Like many people, academics and non-academics alike, I am an inveterate devourer of mysteries — right now I’m in the middle of the 16th Banks novel — but I confess that I didn’t used to carry them on planes. It’s not that I didn’t want to, but when I was quite a bit younger, my reading of choice while traveling was typically some technical work of linguistics. In part, this was because I was (and remain) genuinely interested in the subject. But in part, too, it was because I was something of a snob and had discovered that a good way to keep your neighbor from yakking at you for hours is to bury yourself in something scary-looking with lots of symbols, equations or foreign scripts. (I invite other antisocial eggheads to take note of this technique and try it out for themselves.) In short, the plane was an extension of my office — except that I didn’t have an office since I was a teenager.
In some ways I’m still a snob — and I don’t mean that I’m a shoemaker or a cobbler’s apprentice, which is this funny word’s first meaning — but I’m more sociable these days and have all too slowly begun to take on board that there is more to life than one’s work and standing in the professional rat race. And in any case, making time for breaks of one sort or another is usually said to increase one’s productivity in the long run. The financial adviser who was reading “Macbeth” was perhaps doing so as much to get out of his office as I, with my Peter Robinson, was enjoying getting out of mine.
As it happens, this semester I really have gotten out of my office. It is not from East Pyne that I write but from Oxford, where I have been given the privilege of spending the season the English call autumn and the academic term Oxonians call Michaelmas. Frankly, it’s magnificent. While I am not using daylight hours to read mysteries, it is probably true that I could get more work done by shutting myself up in my familiar office and going about my familiar routine: home, office, Firestone, office, class, meeting, Firestone, lunch maybe, office, class, Firestone, meeting, meeting, coffee, meeting, office, home (and repeat). But there is much to be said for seizing the opportunity now and again to change one’s environment, to meet new people, eat new foods and generally be challenged to bend toward (and, on occasion, think hard about rebelling against) social mores and academic conventions that are not quite what one is used to.
Such rhetoric is or at least should be familiar to all undergraduates, for isn’t this what the Study Abroad Program tells you? I myself didn’t take a semester abroad when I was in college, and while I can’t say I regret the decision, I do sometimes wonder how things would be different if I had. Furthermore, since I spent both of my previous professorial leaves — let’s call them my freshman and sophomore leaves — in and around Princeton, I suppose what I am doing now is taking a very overdue junior year abroad. And it feels good.
Mysteries are a break from linguistics. Oxford is a change from Princeton. OK, fine, but does this column have a coherent point to make? Yes. You may think it’s a poor effort — I freely admit that even after four years, writing for The Daily Princetonian remains a non-routine challenge, one that I do not always succeed at surmounting — but please take away this late-learned lesson: A rich life is not a conventional blow-by-blow news story. Rather, it should have its ramblings, its meanderings, its digressions. So try, sometimes, to live discursively.
Joshua Katz is a professor in the Department of Classics. On leave at All Souls College, Oxford, he can nonetheless still be reached at jtkatz@princeton.edu.
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