Academia Vitae News and Commentary

What to say to the young fellow who does not see the fun of reading difficult texts. His preferred way of living is to work a little and spend as much time as possible with friends, drinking beer and watching movies. Why read, why study, why sit long evenings at a desk to work on an article or read what others have written? Why do all that when there’s not much money in it anyway?

I now and then run into a fellow like this (usually hanging out on a couch). What are the topoi (if you don’t know about rhetoric, topoi are the commonplaces, the repertoire of arguments you can draw from) that may have an impact on such a fellow? What would you say? And what would get him off that couch?

The entire economy is actually a service economy. If you think about it, nearly everyone works to serve others. People grow grain so others can eat, produce cars so others can drive, build so others can live, make movies so others are entertained, teach so others better serve other people. Consultants, therapists, coaches, and volunteers are only more explicit in their servitude.

So we dedicate our lives to help others along. As parents we breed children, as children we take care of parents, and if we do not have anyone to care for we say we are working for the sake of the generations to follow, so we continue helping others along.

If you look at human activity this way, the assertion that humans are selfish is silly. You also are inclined to conclude that all the work we do is simply occupational therapy: we keep each other busy to keep the circular flow going. What is the end of it all? What is the purpose? Society is like a club that is set up to serve its own sustenance.

What is wrong with this way of looking at the economy?
Which texts can we bring in to alter this picture?

Ruud Welten (Assistant Professor at the Academia Vitae) insisted we watch the movie Stalker by Tarkovski with our professional students. It took three hours and I felt rather stupid afterwards. Others I spoke with during a restroom break before our discussion about it had the same feeling. We could not make sense of it. One was even somewhat upset for having wasted so much time on something like this.

We started our discussion sharing what we had seen. No interpretation (although that proved to be difficult). That became one eye opener: how much I, and the others, had seen when we began listing details. I was struck by the fact that I had become aware of the camera, and the presence of the person holding the camera. (Maybe I was influenced by the information that Ruud had given us before we started to watch, in particular the strange fact that several of the crew had died ten years later from the same type of cancer.) We noticed the role of time—the drawn out episodes like the drive into the forbidden zone (that had put me to sleep)—the dream-like scene, the objects in the water, the books in the dwelling of the stalker. Even though we had felt stupid, we had observed a great deal.

In our interpretation we quickly got irritated with each other. Especially after Ruud had called this movie one of the greatest pieces of art ever, others, including myself, began to protest. I myself found the movie somber, devoid of hope and love, and humor and irony, and saw it as a typical self-indulgence, a surrender to a sense of somberness and darkness that I find too often among artists. No matter how seductive the descent into the dark rooms of the souls may be, what is so great about the getting lost in that descent? The group split. Some insisted on the beauty of the movie, the value of the mystery that it pictured, and its theme of the impossibility—or is it risk?—of wishing one’s innermost wish; others saw it mainly as a terribly long, slow, dark movie that had little to offer to the way our life. I belonged to the latter group. Later in the café, we continued our discussion. The question was who had experienced the dark side of life, and who had had the feeling that he was about to loose his grip. We also concluded that we were the stalker, eager as we are to guide, advise, and coach other people to do the things we are not capable of doing. (The stalker is not allowed in the room in which your innermost wish will be fulfilled.) We talked some about the roles of the Scientist and of the Writer. Most thought that the Writer improved in the course of the expedition.

The eye opener here is—although I had learned this before at Academia Vitae—that a good movie provokes, that it causes resistance and even anger, and that its deeper meanings come about in conversation. By having talked about a movie like this one—and by now writing about it—I will never forget it. I suspect that it will be a source for certain insights. I only do not know yet what those insights will be.

Incidentally, the participant who was most upset about having wasted his precious time to watch this movie told us the next day that his final essay will probably be about Stalker.

I suspect that the movie will be on the program more often.