Summer Break, Renovations, A. G. Sertillanges, The Work Begins
Genius Loci readers:
Greetings from the far side of the academic year. It is officially summer break, which checks out. The past few days in Florida have seen near-record heat. Thankfully the humidity has been relatively low, and rain is coming in the next few days to cool things down. I feel free, but also a little lost, like a man standing in the middle of a forest unsure about where to go. But it is more an anxious-excitement lost than a scared lost. There are too many options and possibilities.
I know I complain a lot about how little time I have during the academic year to devote to The Work. But scheduling my out-of-office auto-responder to end on 18 August 2026 has made me forget about the toxins that leach into academia, the so-called “service to the college” and “other duties as assigned." These noxious elements are properly alienating for the professoriat. They take us away from our primary roles: serving students, doing research, writing. And it makes increasingly less sense if and when an school’s administration and local government do what they want anyway. Anyway, enough of this for the next three and a half months.
Three and a half months!
This time will be a kind of detox. I’m ready to get to work, to focus on The Work. You know what I mean. This summer is about making space. Clearing the academic residue out of my system. Pulling sheetrock from the walls of a garage room. Rereading my book proposal with honest eyes and reworking it with careful hands. All of it, making literal and figurative space to do one’s work, is the same project.
New Essay: A Higher Calling
I published a new essay called “A Higher Calling? Where Our Creative Impulse Comes From” last month about the ways in which creative people have described their “vocation” or “calling” — that feeling some of us have of being driven or compelled to pursue our work. Some describe this impulse as coming from a higher power. Others, it is a kind of internal impulse.
The essay is an essay in the proper sense of the term: a test, an attempt to examine ideas and figure out what I think about a topic. I’m happy with it, not least because I learned something while writing it. Specifically, that what I had always felt as my “calling” has a long history entangled in religious and spiritual thinking. And this is a powerful motivational force for work.
“The Intellectual Life”
My essay “A Higher Calling?” was inspired by a book I read: A. G. Sertillanges’s The Intellectual Life (amazon|bookshop).
In his book, Sertillanges calls intellectual work a “vocation” and thought of it as a literal calling from god. He also offers a vision of what intellectual practice looks like. His vision is a Catholic one, rooted in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. Considering its foundation is set in medieval Christian thinking, the book can feel dated. For one, Sertillanges speaks of the intellectual as a man’s occupation, whose wife must acknowledge her husband’s sacred call.
Leibniz reportedly said, “there is no book so bad that you could not get something out of it.” Sertillanges himself suggests something similar: intellectuals must look for what is true and useful in all works, even flawed ones. He asks us not to “linger endlessly over differences” when we read, but to focus instead on what serves our projects and mission. It is as if Sertillanges has given us permission to salvage his text for its useful parts — or, as Thomas Jefferson once described the moral teachings of Jesus, to find the “diamonds on a dunghill.”
I don’t mean to imply Sertillanges’s book is a dunghill. But some parts shine more brightly than others. Among them: a framework for living the so-called “life of the mind,” and a discussion of the necessary sacrifices one must make to live this kind of life to its fullest. If rigor and dedication are central to this lifestyle, readers of The Intellectual Life might be surprised to find Sertillanges also advocating for balance, moderation, and play.
His advice is generally good, not just for intellectual life, but for any kind of dedicated, rigorous living. The book is less a practical guide to researching, studying, writing, or publishing than it is a guide to the kind of devotion required to live this life fully, without abandoning the world, your family, or your friends. Being an intellectual, Sertillanges argues, is not a career one stumbles walk into. It is a lifestyle, a way of living in and seeing the world. His advice is generally good, not just for intellectual life, but for any kind of dedicated, rigorous living. The book is less a practical guide to researching, studying, writing, or publishing than it is a guide to the kind of devotion required to live this life fully, without abandoning the world, your family, or your friends. Being an intellectual, Sertillanges argues, is not a career one stumbles into. It is a lifestyle, a way of living in and seeing the world, that one consciously adopts.
Study / Studio Remodel
Since Luciano came into our lives, our house feels smaller. What was an office became Luciano’s bedroom. What was a dedicated guest room became a multipurpose room: office, guest room, storage. Books are everywhere. Battery chargers. Old cameras and rolls of developed film ready to be cut and archived. Stacks of mail I thought I’d get to. My desk has become its own episode of Hoarders. It isn’t comfortable for our friends or family when they visit, though they’re too gracious to complain. And it isn’t a comfortable place to get work done, to retreat in quiet comfort.
There is a small room in the back of our garage. At 12 x 6 feet (roughly 4 x 2 meters), it is half the size of a small bedroom. When we were viewing this home, the realtor joked that it would make a good “man cave.” It is that kind of space, detached and private. The room is unfinished. It has poorly hung drywall barely painted white, no insulation in the walls or ceiling, no door, no electricity within the room itself. Its window is a single-pane antique. The room is usually a sauna.
I am going to renovate the space into a proper study and studio. To do this, I’ll need to pull down all the sheetrock from the walls and ceiling, rip off the furring strips and drywall screws, run electricity, insulate, hang new drywall, install a door, install a new window, add flooring, and so on.
I’ve never done anything like this before.
There is no going back. I’ve already started renovating it. In the past week, I have completely gutted the room, stripping it down to the bare block wall. I punched out the old window and hung a new one. I installed new outlet boxes — as it turned out, the room was already wired on an unmarked 20-amp circuit. And oer the next few weeks, I’ll finish the job… hopefully.
The goal isn’t to make an Instagrammable workspace in line with my “dark academia” predilections. The goal is to get a functional, comfortable space into operational condition as soon as possible.
Book Proposal
The workspace matters for my summer work plans and my work On Mountains. My larger goal is to get the book proposal into good enough shape to solicit feedback from friends and mentors, so I can begin querying agents later this year. I’ve already written a solid draft, so I’m not starting with a blank canvas. But I need to get clear and honest about the book’s angle and boundaries given my current work and life conditions. I have two possible paths: one more appealing, the other more realistic and less costly in time and resources. One version of the book is the book I want to write. The other is the book I might actually be able to finish given my current constraints. I’m trying to figure out if those are the same book.
This process will also necessitate creating an outline, which sets a clear path on where to go and what paths to ignore. Having this constraint will be helpful for creative clarity.
The proposal, like my new study, isn’t finished. But the summer has started, and that’s enough to get excited about… On that note, I’m off to enjoy a birthday snack.
Thanks for reading and farewell,
JB
