ting them back, or in love, toting them home? To be lost in time
is to find your roots.If you want a more formal approach, many colleges, univer-
sities, and community colleges offer classes in literature, philos-
ophy, and history. Just to let you know that I sometimes
practice what I preach: I once went to Cambridge with two of
my children so that we could all take classes together. My
choice was Charles Dickens and Victorian England. My daugh-
ter Kate studied Shakespearean comedies, and my son Will
took Darwin and modern science. We stayed on one floor of
Trinity Hall at Trinity College and spent a marvelous three
weeks immersed in our books, excitedly swapping the best of
what we were learning.
Now a professor of constitutional law at American Univer-
sity, Jamie Raskin was an assistant attorney general in Boston
when he warned against letting your ambition get in the way of
your intellectual growth: “‘Ambition is the death of thought,’ as
Wittgenstein said. A number of my friends are as ambitious as I
am, but they suppress any thoughts that might be subversive or
dangerous to their ambitions. Your intellectual life is really the
ability to see how things can be different, and big institutions in
society, whether public or private, often ask people to toe the
line in any number of ways—personal, political, ideological.
And clearly one can get ahead by doing that. I guess the only
way to prevent ambition from killing your intellectual life is not
to be afraid of losing, or to say something people might think is
wrong, or crazy, something the institution isn’t ready to hear
yet.... If you want a concrete tip, learn how to speed read.
People say they don’t have time to read. My feeling is, ‘When in
doubt, read it.’ I can read a book in a couple of hours.”
Knowing the World