Wow! That's quite the history. Thanks for sharing it, new as I am to your substack. I do hope you're loving Mantel's Cromwell trilogy - I love it, and think she was a genius (a great loss when she died last year). Interesting on the financial vs intellectual capital - I was never focused enough to get into something that generated financial capital. I was musing on this the other year with a friend of mine from university who had made financial capital, and he said "But you were never interested by or moved by money. And that's what I always liked about you." I found that kind of odd but reaffirming, although it discounts money as a hygiene factor - a hygiene factor I've never had, and which probably goes a long way to explaining my own digestive battles! Look forward to reading more, and applaud your openness and your donation of paid subs to Robin Hood Foundation. R
Thanks Richard for the comment. I am loving Mantel's trilogy. You made me think that in Cromwell's case, his "capital" was pretty much all the King's attitude.
Part of my drive to accumulate intellectual capital is that it makes me feel safe. Sometimes this is literal.
In 1971, My sister, my cousin, and myself, aged 21, 15, and 20 went on a 6-week bike ride from Seattle WA to South Dakota. We passed through Glacier Park where there are grizzly bears. To prepare ourselves I read every possible thing I could about grizzly bears.
Grizzly bears have very poor eyesight and mostly rely on smell and hearing. The best way to avoid problems is to make noise as you walk through the wilderness, with a bear rattle, a noisemaker.
Bears mostly don't want you to be there. So, laying down and making yourself obscure is generally a great way to do that. Another good move is to play dead even if you are attacked.
There are only two situations in which bears mount determined attacks: the more common is when a woman is menstruating, which they apparently find quite upsetting. The rarest attack is when they are hungry and actively hunting human food. The first kind of attack doesn't happen every year and the second doesn't happen every decade.
I'm giving this elaborate example of my quest for knowledge, because learning about anything makes me feel safe. Bizarrely, it makes me feel safe even if I'm learning about the Roman Empire, or the American Revolution.
Of course, these latter entities are not likely to come and try to bite me in the butt! 😉😉😉
I dusted off my "learn everything about it strategy" when I rode across the country on a bicycle in the 2000s. I can tell you about rattlesnakes, coyotes, and javilinas, as well as anti-abduction strategies for a single woman alone on a bicycle. Fortunately, no problems to report.
If I am emotionally upset, I take a book out of Internet Archive— almost always about some aspect of history— and have my computer read it aloud to me. Learning is my safe place.
The grizzly bear advice is a great example of useful knowledge. It made me think of the movie "The Edge," with Anthony Hopkins. Best "bear" movie I've seen. What could be a better safe space than learning? Always available and inexhaustible.
Kathleen, I love this history! And I feel compelled to share that I had a pathological phobia of spiders and spider bites as a kid, so as a young adult in college I decided I needed to learn all I could about them. I got the equivalent of a minor in arachnology, attended a spider biology conference, and obsessively read papers on spider venom.
Then, one day, I was actually bitten by a brown recluse. By that time, I wasn’t afraid of spiders anymore. I knew then that these bites were rare, and how it was likely to progress. Because I could identify it right away, knew the most common things it was mistaken for, and best practices in treatment, I was able to manage it in the best possible way. It was pretty bad, but not as bad as I had feared, and today (15 years later) I’m really glad I had that experience—and even more glad I had studied up in advance.
These days, I’m the person in our household in charge of relocating spiders outdoors.
Thanks for the story! What got you in the vicinity of a brown recluse? I hope you weren't playing with it! I agree that in almost every circumstance, knowledge is power.
No, I was sleeping on a relative’s couch when I was visiting. This house, in rural southern Kansas, was actually used as a study site in a study of brown recluse vs. cobweb spider population dynamics—so I knew it had a solid population of recluses living in it. By that point, I wasn’t scared, though—I knew that brown recluse envenomations were very rare even in places with many brown recluses, and I had slept on this sofa while visiting many times before.
PS: I had a mild aversion to spiders as a child, but it vanished the minute I learned that spiders predate on insects. So now when I see a spider I say, “Go eat them bugs, little buddy!”
A very interesting post/article/essay (what do we call it on Substack?). I'm new here after joining for WolfCrawl following a fantastic year reading War and Peace on IG. Perhaps with this great literature I'm accumulating intellectual capital which is a concept I've not thought about before. It certainly makes me feel better that there are different types of wealth.
-- Through meaningful mentorship and by emulating exemplary role models, it’s possible to enhance our intellectual capital, empowering ourselves to make impactful and palpable contributions to any field, community, and society. I value the enrichment they bring to my life. Thanks for the insightful words, David.
My adviser in college, where I was an English major, was the late great Karl Kroeber (I got an A in his class, which is relevant to this story). When I went to ask him whether I should pursue an English lit PhD, he asked if there was anything else I might consider doing. I said I also had an interest in law, and he immediately exclaimed “Do that!” It was one of the two or three best pieces of advice I’ve ever gotten.
I, too, studied with Karl Kroeber, in graduate school! A great teacher and scholar, indeed. I have very specific memories of discussions we had about Emma and Frankenstein. (Different classes, I think!) Many things considered -- including your satisfaction with it! -- he gave you great advice.
His class on the Romantics was memorable: Mary Shelley, Blake, Coleridge etc. Columbia’s English dept circa 1977-81 was like the 1927 Yankees: him, Seidel, Bercovitch, Tayler’s Shakespeare, Ann Douglas — how lucky were we!
Nice analogy. They were all still there in the mid 80s, when I started grad school. Seidel was my mentor in Joyce, Douglas in Modernism. Both served on my orals committee. Many from those days, like Kroeber, are now, sadly, gone, though I know Seidel and Douglas are still with us.
Having two Harvard graduates (PHD and design school) I grew up in a family where words and knowledge had ALL the capital with the pursuit of wealth just something other people did. Most of my life I have been grateful but there were times I wondered if more practical concerns could have been addressed.
Bourdieu totally rocked my world in grad school and gave me an entirely new perspective. I love the way you used him here to highlight all the different kinds of capital in your own life. And, it was cool to learn a bit more about your time in grad school! Loneliness and a precarious job market are pretty apt descriptions of ph.d. program life. For some of us, it worked out. #blessed
I have to say that until I was pointed to that shorter essay, i was really struggling with understanding his book "Distinction." He is not a very accessible writer to someone like me who is not steeped in sociology. That said, his insights are brilliant. I definitely want to explore his social capital concept more. Ever since I read Bourdieu's take on it, I've been seeing social capital at work in my life all over the place. Thanks as always for the comment!
I love this piece of writing! You are funny and engaging and I can definitely concur with you about loving to learn new and interesting facts. I say that I have a head full of randomalia, a word of my own design that I think is quite apt. Thank you for writing. 😊
Thanks for this, David. It is so insightful. In some senses, we are opposites, since I love ambiguity, as opposed to precision. which is probably why I do what I do. But I must say that you have made good use of your intellectual time: your essays are always full of ideas and interest. Of course, one problem with living this “life of the mind” for so many decades is that I don’t know if I will ever be able to afford to retire—so sometimes I wish that I had gone into finance! 😉 (Actually, that’s not true; I would have had no talent for it and probably would have burned out.)
Perhaps the life of the mind is a life that doesn't fit with retirement whatsoever. I'm always careful to say i retired from finance and now spend a lot of time thinking, reading, and writing.
For some reason i just thought of that great and awful Twilight Zone episode when a Walter Mitty type never has time to read. Then there's some apocalypse and he's the only one alive. So he has no one to bother hm and all the time to read. Until he breaks his one pair of glasses.
I love this, David. Whenever I get caught up in the comparison game with my friends who are more successful than me "objectively" aka financially, I often think of the "capital" I've acquired through deep relationships and various life experiences. In many ways, I do consider my friendships and my relationship with literature and writing as my wealth.
Balance is key and often so elusive! Sometimes we have to dedicate years of our life to one side of the scale and then course correct. Hard for everything to be in perfect equilibrium all at once.
It sounds like you took the right path. As the wife, mother, sister and niece – oh yes, and granddaughter – of academics, it is not something suitable to all personalities. And it certainly isn't lucrative except in rare exceptions. Many people seek out a change of career or focus at your age and I think that's great. And you have plenty of time to pursue it, say I just turned age 82. I haven't stopped learning yet and hope I never do.
Second comment of today. In addition to your newsletter, I also read that of Hanif Kureishi and I thought his post of today might interest you, as it is dealing with some of the same issues from a completely different point of view - he is a well-known writer here in the UK, but had a recent accident and is completely bed-bound: https://hanifkureishi.substack.com/p/money-and-how-it-gets-that-way
Thank you for these very generous words, David. I know I've said before how much I admire your self-exploration in Sparks from Culture and what you also talk about here, your redirecting your life interests now that you feel comfortable to do so. It's a kind of rebirth, a reinvention of the self. It reminds me of another Substacker, @Deerambeau , someone who has lived a different life from you, and from me, but is very open and introspective and remarkably transformative in his commitment, in his case, to recovery. (I'm not suggesting you're a recovering financier! :) That capacity for reinvention is rare.
I enjoyed your thoughts. Query whether there is a higher and better pursuit than financial capital or intellectual capital? While both are desirous, neither can completely (in my view) satisfy the soul, no matter how much of either type of capital is obtained. Familial capital — I like that. Character capital? That could include being a good spouse, a good parent, a good son, a good sibling, a good neighbor, a good provider. Just a thought. You will be successful in pursuing any type of capital.
Thanks Kirk for the comment. I agree with you. In an earlier version, I was thinking of "moral capital," which might be defined as being decent and kind. While all these types of capital interrelate, it is useful to think about them separately as part of introspection.
I enjoyed looking forward to this follow-up to last week's essay. I'm reminded of what Warren Buffet allegedly told shareholders and interviewers: The most important decision anyone can make is to "marry the right person" - a factor that influences every form of capital, not to mention the intangibles like peace of mind and self-esteem. You hint about it here when (humorously now) you allowed yourself to believe that your wife got over her fear of an academic future quickly. :-) I love these little humorous reflections in your essays.
Thanks Isabel. I always appreciate your comments and I feel very much the same way about Substack as a place for deep engagement.
That’s exactly what it feels like! As if we are all taking time time to grow and consider and be wide-eyed. Lovely comment.
Wow! That's quite the history. Thanks for sharing it, new as I am to your substack. I do hope you're loving Mantel's Cromwell trilogy - I love it, and think she was a genius (a great loss when she died last year). Interesting on the financial vs intellectual capital - I was never focused enough to get into something that generated financial capital. I was musing on this the other year with a friend of mine from university who had made financial capital, and he said "But you were never interested by or moved by money. And that's what I always liked about you." I found that kind of odd but reaffirming, although it discounts money as a hygiene factor - a hygiene factor I've never had, and which probably goes a long way to explaining my own digestive battles! Look forward to reading more, and applaud your openness and your donation of paid subs to Robin Hood Foundation. R
Thanks Richard for the comment. I am loving Mantel's trilogy. You made me think that in Cromwell's case, his "capital" was pretty much all the King's attitude.
Part of my drive to accumulate intellectual capital is that it makes me feel safe. Sometimes this is literal.
In 1971, My sister, my cousin, and myself, aged 21, 15, and 20 went on a 6-week bike ride from Seattle WA to South Dakota. We passed through Glacier Park where there are grizzly bears. To prepare ourselves I read every possible thing I could about grizzly bears.
Grizzly bears have very poor eyesight and mostly rely on smell and hearing. The best way to avoid problems is to make noise as you walk through the wilderness, with a bear rattle, a noisemaker.
Bears mostly don't want you to be there. So, laying down and making yourself obscure is generally a great way to do that. Another good move is to play dead even if you are attacked.
There are only two situations in which bears mount determined attacks: the more common is when a woman is menstruating, which they apparently find quite upsetting. The rarest attack is when they are hungry and actively hunting human food. The first kind of attack doesn't happen every year and the second doesn't happen every decade.
I'm giving this elaborate example of my quest for knowledge, because learning about anything makes me feel safe. Bizarrely, it makes me feel safe even if I'm learning about the Roman Empire, or the American Revolution.
Of course, these latter entities are not likely to come and try to bite me in the butt! 😉😉😉
I dusted off my "learn everything about it strategy" when I rode across the country on a bicycle in the 2000s. I can tell you about rattlesnakes, coyotes, and javilinas, as well as anti-abduction strategies for a single woman alone on a bicycle. Fortunately, no problems to report.
If I am emotionally upset, I take a book out of Internet Archive— almost always about some aspect of history— and have my computer read it aloud to me. Learning is my safe place.
The grizzly bear advice is a great example of useful knowledge. It made me think of the movie "The Edge," with Anthony Hopkins. Best "bear" movie I've seen. What could be a better safe space than learning? Always available and inexhaustible.
"Available and inexhaustible" . . . I like!
Kathleen, I love this history! And I feel compelled to share that I had a pathological phobia of spiders and spider bites as a kid, so as a young adult in college I decided I needed to learn all I could about them. I got the equivalent of a minor in arachnology, attended a spider biology conference, and obsessively read papers on spider venom.
Then, one day, I was actually bitten by a brown recluse. By that time, I wasn’t afraid of spiders anymore. I knew then that these bites were rare, and how it was likely to progress. Because I could identify it right away, knew the most common things it was mistaken for, and best practices in treatment, I was able to manage it in the best possible way. It was pretty bad, but not as bad as I had feared, and today (15 years later) I’m really glad I had that experience—and even more glad I had studied up in advance.
These days, I’m the person in our household in charge of relocating spiders outdoors.
Thanks for the story! What got you in the vicinity of a brown recluse? I hope you weren't playing with it! I agree that in almost every circumstance, knowledge is power.
No, I was sleeping on a relative’s couch when I was visiting. This house, in rural southern Kansas, was actually used as a study site in a study of brown recluse vs. cobweb spider population dynamics—so I knew it had a solid population of recluses living in it. By that point, I wasn’t scared, though—I knew that brown recluse envenomations were very rare even in places with many brown recluses, and I had slept on this sofa while visiting many times before.
So glad you were intellectually and emotionally ready for that!
PS: I had a mild aversion to spiders as a child, but it vanished the minute I learned that spiders predate on insects. So now when I see a spider I say, “Go eat them bugs, little buddy!”
A very interesting post/article/essay (what do we call it on Substack?). I'm new here after joining for WolfCrawl following a fantastic year reading War and Peace on IG. Perhaps with this great literature I'm accumulating intellectual capital which is a concept I've not thought about before. It certainly makes me feel better that there are different types of wealth.
Tolstoy and the wolfcrawl are definitely additions to intellectual capital.
-- Through meaningful mentorship and by emulating exemplary role models, it’s possible to enhance our intellectual capital, empowering ourselves to make impactful and palpable contributions to any field, community, and society. I value the enrichment they bring to my life. Thanks for the insightful words, David.
Thanks Thaissa.
My adviser in college, where I was an English major, was the late great Karl Kroeber (I got an A in his class, which is relevant to this story). When I went to ask him whether I should pursue an English lit PhD, he asked if there was anything else I might consider doing. I said I also had an interest in law, and he immediately exclaimed “Do that!” It was one of the two or three best pieces of advice I’ve ever gotten.
I, too, studied with Karl Kroeber, in graduate school! A great teacher and scholar, indeed. I have very specific memories of discussions we had about Emma and Frankenstein. (Different classes, I think!) Many things considered -- including your satisfaction with it! -- he gave you great advice.
His class on the Romantics was memorable: Mary Shelley, Blake, Coleridge etc. Columbia’s English dept circa 1977-81 was like the 1927 Yankees: him, Seidel, Bercovitch, Tayler’s Shakespeare, Ann Douglas — how lucky were we!
Nice analogy. They were all still there in the mid 80s, when I started grad school. Seidel was my mentor in Joyce, Douglas in Modernism. Both served on my orals committee. Many from those days, like Kroeber, are now, sadly, gone, though I know Seidel and Douglas are still with us.
I forgot to mention Wallace Grey’s popular course on Eliot, Joyce and Pound. He was my thesis advisor too
Having two Harvard graduates (PHD and design school) I grew up in a family where words and knowledge had ALL the capital with the pursuit of wealth just something other people did. Most of my life I have been grateful but there were times I wondered if more practical concerns could have been addressed.
Molly, well, since I get to read what you write, I'm selfishly grateful that you emphasized knowledge capital!
Bourdieu totally rocked my world in grad school and gave me an entirely new perspective. I love the way you used him here to highlight all the different kinds of capital in your own life. And, it was cool to learn a bit more about your time in grad school! Loneliness and a precarious job market are pretty apt descriptions of ph.d. program life. For some of us, it worked out. #blessed
Jillian,
I have to say that until I was pointed to that shorter essay, i was really struggling with understanding his book "Distinction." He is not a very accessible writer to someone like me who is not steeped in sociology. That said, his insights are brilliant. I definitely want to explore his social capital concept more. Ever since I read Bourdieu's take on it, I've been seeing social capital at work in my life all over the place. Thanks as always for the comment!
I love this piece of writing! You are funny and engaging and I can definitely concur with you about loving to learn new and interesting facts. I say that I have a head full of randomalia, a word of my own design that I think is quite apt. Thank you for writing. 😊
Thanks for the comment. It's great, isn't it, how learning something can be fun in and of itself without any apparent utility.
I've always thought so! 😁
Thanks for this, David. It is so insightful. In some senses, we are opposites, since I love ambiguity, as opposed to precision. which is probably why I do what I do. But I must say that you have made good use of your intellectual time: your essays are always full of ideas and interest. Of course, one problem with living this “life of the mind” for so many decades is that I don’t know if I will ever be able to afford to retire—so sometimes I wish that I had gone into finance! 😉 (Actually, that’s not true; I would have had no talent for it and probably would have burned out.)
Perhaps the life of the mind is a life that doesn't fit with retirement whatsoever. I'm always careful to say i retired from finance and now spend a lot of time thinking, reading, and writing.
For some reason i just thought of that great and awful Twilight Zone episode when a Walter Mitty type never has time to read. Then there's some apocalypse and he's the only one alive. So he has no one to bother hm and all the time to read. Until he breaks his one pair of glasses.
Played by Burgess Meredith!
I never knew that!
I love this, David. Whenever I get caught up in the comparison game with my friends who are more successful than me "objectively" aka financially, I often think of the "capital" I've acquired through deep relationships and various life experiences. In many ways, I do consider my friendships and my relationship with literature and writing as my wealth.
I think those forms of capital are very much undervalued. I suspect the lack of balance is at the root of many people feeling alienated and unhappy.
Balance is key and often so elusive! Sometimes we have to dedicate years of our life to one side of the scale and then course correct. Hard for everything to be in perfect equilibrium all at once.
It sounds like you took the right path. As the wife, mother, sister and niece – oh yes, and granddaughter – of academics, it is not something suitable to all personalities. And it certainly isn't lucrative except in rare exceptions. Many people seek out a change of career or focus at your age and I think that's great. And you have plenty of time to pursue it, say I just turned age 82. I haven't stopped learning yet and hope I never do.
Hi Ann,
Reading your Substack and your comments here, I'm sure your love of learning is permanent!
Second comment of today. In addition to your newsletter, I also read that of Hanif Kureishi and I thought his post of today might interest you, as it is dealing with some of the same issues from a completely different point of view - he is a well-known writer here in the UK, but had a recent accident and is completely bed-bound: https://hanifkureishi.substack.com/p/money-and-how-it-gets-that-way
I read his post and thoroughly enjoyed it. i subscribed a dn mentioned that you had recommended it to me. Thanks, Ann.
Thank you for posting the Kureishi link. I did not know about his accident.
Thank you for these very generous words, David. I know I've said before how much I admire your self-exploration in Sparks from Culture and what you also talk about here, your redirecting your life interests now that you feel comfortable to do so. It's a kind of rebirth, a reinvention of the self. It reminds me of another Substacker, @Deerambeau , someone who has lived a different life from you, and from me, but is very open and introspective and remarkably transformative in his commitment, in his case, to recovery. (I'm not suggesting you're a recovering financier! :) That capacity for reinvention is rare.
Thanks Jay. I read and admire Dee as well.
I enjoyed your thoughts. Query whether there is a higher and better pursuit than financial capital or intellectual capital? While both are desirous, neither can completely (in my view) satisfy the soul, no matter how much of either type of capital is obtained. Familial capital — I like that. Character capital? That could include being a good spouse, a good parent, a good son, a good sibling, a good neighbor, a good provider. Just a thought. You will be successful in pursuing any type of capital.
Thanks Kirk for the comment. I agree with you. In an earlier version, I was thinking of "moral capital," which might be defined as being decent and kind. While all these types of capital interrelate, it is useful to think about them separately as part of introspection.
Does this higher and better pursuit need a different word than capital?
I enjoyed looking forward to this follow-up to last week's essay. I'm reminded of what Warren Buffet allegedly told shareholders and interviewers: The most important decision anyone can make is to "marry the right person" - a factor that influences every form of capital, not to mention the intangibles like peace of mind and self-esteem. You hint about it here when (humorously now) you allowed yourself to believe that your wife got over her fear of an academic future quickly. :-) I love these little humorous reflections in your essays.
Thanks, clairvoyant Tara.
😂✨