From Word To Word

I usually avoid commenting on contemporary events in this forum, not because I lack the interest, though this is often true as well, but because it is one of the ways that I am trying to write the web more slowly, one of the ways that I am trying to contest the internet’s habitual demand for speed and currency.  Today, however, I discovered an article in the Globe and Mail that I feel compelled to discuss, and so, since it is probably necessary to prove the rule in any case, I will make this one exception.

The article, for those who would prefer not to read it for themselves, reports that professor Denis Rancourt has been fired from the University of Ottawa for refusing to provide individual grades to his fourth year physics class.  During the first class of the semester, he informed his students that they would each be receiving a grade of A+, which would free them from the pressure to test well and permit them to be scientists instead.  Though Rancourt had previously been involved in his share of controversies, it was this refusal to grade that finally convinced the university to take the very rare step of firing a tenured faculty member.

This should not surprise anyone very much, of course.  I could write for pages about how the ability to measure knowledge through grades and and courses and degrees is essential to the viability of the educational institution as such, about how this imposes on the institutional instructor the necessity of justifying grades through all the procedures of marking and commenting and correcting that consume so much of their time, and about how this permits the educational institution to attain only, at its highest, to a kind of editorial approach to learning.  I will spare us all those pages.

Instead, I just want to express my saddness at seeing the inevitable suppression of the desire for learning by institutionalized education.  I know almost nothing about Rancourt, and I am not otherwise endorsing him in any way, but I applaud his attempt to encourage learning to take place in the cracks and crevices of education, and I sympathize with him in his present situation.  Though I am cynical enough to believe that this must necessarily be the result of what he was attempting to do, I am grieved, as I always am, that learning can find no place for itself in the university.

“Authority,” says Michel de Certeau, “is indissociable from an abuse of knowledge.”  This is because the knowledge on which authority is supposed to be based cannot be adequately translated to those over whom the authority is to be exercised.  In other words, in order for experts to communicate their expertise to those who are not experts, they must necessarily reduce, simplify, distort, and otherwise do violence to the knowledge that is the basis of their status and of their authority.  In this sense, the expert could perhaps be defined as the one who gains authority through the abuse of an inequity of knowledge.

This relationship between the expert and knowledge is produced because the one with knowledge only appears as an expert, only takes on this role, with respect to those who are not also experts in the same knowledge.  It is precisely this inequity of knowledge that creates the expert as such.  Where there is equality of knowledge, there is no expert.  The role of the expert only exists in relation to the role of the inexpert.  It is defined by this inequity of knowledge, and its function is to translate knowledge across this inequity, not necessarily to erase it, of course, because this would be to eliminate the expert’s own role, but more often to emphasize it and to reinforce the authority that it provides the expert.

I would argue, however, that the inequity that produces the expert is not always one of knowledge alone, but is often also an inequity in practise, in time, in access to tools, or in access to resources.  It may be sometimes that I will defer to an expert because I lack the expert’s knowledge, but it is just as likely that I will defer because I lack the practice to make this knowledge useful, or because I do not have the tools to make my practise applicable, or because I do not have the materials on which to use my tools, or for many other reasons. Expertise, in other words, is not merely a product of knowledge, but of many factors: experience, practise, reputation, equipment, materials, models, etcetera, all of which necessarily become abused when they become the basis of an authority.  The expert, then, expanding on my earlier definition, would be the one who gains authority through the abuse of an inequity in expertise

If, however, the expert is the one who abuses expertise by making it found an authority,  I would suggest that the amateur is the one who uses expertise by allowing it to found a humility. This means that the difference between the amateur and the expert is not based on the degree of expertise that they possess, or on whether they employ their expertise in a paid profession, but on the role that they play in relation to knowledge.  Where the expert occupies a role of mastery in regard to expertise and uses this role to underwrite an authority, the amateur occupies a role of humility in regard to expertise and uses this role to express a desire for knowledge.

This does not mean that the amateur never shares expertise.  Quite the opposite.  The amateur, driven by a desire for knowledge and by a humility in the face of knowledge, will be continually sharing expertise, but only in ways that do not seek to found an authority.  The amateur models rather than dictates, discusses rather than lectures, assists rather than demonstrates, and this is true with every kind of expertise, whether it be how to change the oil in a car, how to grow organic tomatoes, how to read a novel, how to bake a pie, or how to solve trigonometric equations.  Rather than permitting an inequity of expertise to become the basis of an authority that can only abuse what founds it, the amateur encourages this inequity to become the basis of a familiarity that is intended only to provide the model of the amateur’s own desire for knowledge.  Rather than maintaining a distance of authority, the amateur invites participation in the doing and learning and teaching of knowledge.

What this means, of course, is that many of the positions in which experts now function are not recuperable by the amateur.  Even the most innovative teacher, for example, is often constrained to function in the role of the expert, and many other occupations have even less opportunity to choose amateurism over expertise.  Wherever a person’s function is determined as a matter of economics, or of legality, or of governmentality, there will be a tendency to privilege the expert at the expense of the amateur.  Though it is possible for one to function as an amateur in a professional setting, therefore, amateurism is mostly expressed in the places where legal, professional, governmental, and cultural forces are least felt, in the cracks and crevices that these forces necessarily maintain within themselves.  It appears here and there, wherever there is space and desire and opportunity.

Amateurism, defined in this way, is related to the kind of intellectualism that I outlined a few days ago in my post on the difference between intellect and intelligence.  They are both ways to describe an approach to knowledge that is founded in desire.  The true intellectualism that I described in that post, the one whose primary desire for knowledge is neither an end in itself nor a means to an end but is a means to the self, this kind of intellectualism must always remain an amateurism also. Its relation to knowledge must always take the form of a fundamental humility that immerses itself in knowledge rather than trying to encompass knowledge in itself, from which it might be measured out as an education, sold as a commodity, or used to guarantee an authority.  A true intellectualism, a true amateurism, is never able to occupy this position, is never able to play the role of the expert, because this role does a violence to the object of its desire. It reduces the amateur’s eroticism to something it can no longer recognize and can no longer love.

I have written previously about the significance of solitude, but recently I have been feeling acutely the lack of this kind of aloneness, and this sense was heightened yesterday as I was reading a blog called Daily Routines, which describes the habits of famous writers and artists.  It struck me forcefully how divergent my preferred routines would be from the ones that I actually live, because of work and family and other obligations.

My inclination would be not to have to see or speak to anyone from when I wake in the morning until early afternoon or even later.  I would prefer to breakfast and lunch alone, and this would be time that I spent doing nothing but thinking, or reading, or writing.  If it was to be spent thinking, I would want to be working at something as well, in the garden or the kitchen usually, but almost anything would do.  If it was to be spent reading or writing, I would want to be working at something more intermittent, something that permitted me merely to surface now and again, like a pot of soup stock or a batch of bread.  In any case, I would need a steady supply of very dark coffee, something to keep a bitterness on the back of my tongue.

Sometime in the afternoon, I would begin to exhaust my focus, and I would want conversation with someone.  Ideally, this person would be comfortable enough with me and my house that we would work together to prepare supper as we talked.  There would not need to be any particular form to this conversation.  Its purpose would be only to sift what I had done that day, to share it with another mind, to have it returned to me in a different form than I first shared it.  This exchange might happen over coffee again, but I would prefer by far that it happen over a red wine that was very dry, something harsh to the palette.  I dislike subtlety in wine.

I would prefer to have supper with several people, five or six at most, and I would want most of them to know one another, so that conversation need not remain long on superficialities.  This meal should linger, enveloping the whole evening, taking into itself the coffee that accompanies the dessert and the scotch that follows it.  In the summer, it should end on the porch with my pipe, in the winter, by the fire with a hot toddy, and I should spend at least an hour longer alone there after everyone else has left.

In practice, however, and probably for the better, my life very seldom resembles this ideal.  From the moment that my youngest son wakes me in the morning, I will likely not have a moment of solitude all day long.  If I accomplish reading or writing or anything at all, it will be in the few grains of time that I glean from the wake of my children, and my work, and my other commitments.  I might find a few minutes of aloneness as I am walking from one place to another or when those in my house are distracted by something else, but I can rarely predict these moments.  I seem only to have discovered them when they are ended.

In most senses, I do not begrudge this lack.  The things that seize my time are things that I value very much, and I am happy to give them their due.  There are moments, however, when I long for nothing else than the space for aloneness, when the difference between my ideal and actual routines seems about to break me.  Most of all, what I want of this solitude is silence, or at least the quietude that is more silent than silence, the quietude of natural sound when it suddenly finds itself in the absence of the human and  artificial.  I want to hear nothing that demands anything of me but grateful inattention, and I sometimes long for nothing more than this quiet and this solitude.

I would eventually like to discuss expertise and amateurism in relation to some ideas that Michel de Certeau forwards in The Practice of Everyday Life, but much of what I would like to say will depend on a distinction between intellect and intelligence that I am taking largely from Jaques Barzun’s The House of Intellect, a subject that I would prefer to discuss quite separately, so I am writing this post by way of preparation for later things.

Before I even get that far, however, I need to say that I have a very ambivalent relationship to Barzun in most respects.  I will not take the time to discuss the reasons for this ambivalence in any detail.  I will just say that I respect some of his ideas very much, but that our perspectives on fundamental issues diverge very widely, and I would not want my use of this particular idea to imply an endorsement of his thinking generally.

The distinction that I am taking from Barzun is between intelligence, which he defines as the native or protean ability to accomplish ends according to one’s wits, and intellect, which is the knowledge that is passed down by a community.  Intelligence innovates, invents, solves, whereas intellect is the common body of knowledge that intelligence has discovered as it becomes shared and applied in a community.  Intellect is, in Barzun’s own words, “intelligence stored up and made into habits of discipline, signs, and symbols of meaning, chains of reasoning, and spurs to emotion – a shorthand and a wireless by which the mind can skip connectives, recognize ability, and communicate truth.  Intellect is at once a body of common knowledge and the channels through which the right particle of it can be brought to bear quickly, without the effort of redemonstration, on the matter at hand.”

This distinction is crucial for me because it locates the role of the intellect and of intellectualism as inseparable from intelligence.  Intelligence produces knowledge, but the intellect collects this knowledge and makes it available to the community, permitting those who have intelligence in one way or another to build upon it and produce new knowledge, but also permitting those without intelligence in one way or another to function as if they did.  So, for example, if I had a great deal of mathematical ability, which I most certainly do not, I would not have to discover trigonometry through my own intelligence, since this knowledge would be available to me through the community’s intellect, through its body of common knowledge, so that I could apply my intelligence to higher orders of mathematical research that have not yet been added to that common knowledge.  Conversely, if I did not have any real mathematical intelligence, which is much closer to the case, I could still make use of trigonometry, even if my understanding of it was imperfect, because I could draw upon the community’s shared knowledge when I needed it, through others who did understand, through books or other resources, and through calculators or other devices.  The function of the intellect, in short, is to serve intelligence, either by enabling it or by substituting for it.

For Barzun, this intellect, this body of common knowledge, is understood primarily as literary and alphabetical.  While he does not explicitly reject the possibility of other kinds of common knowledge, whether they be orally transmitted, physically modelled, visually projected, or virtually transferred, he emphasizes to exclusion the kinds of intellectual communities that have been established around the written text and that have become institutionalized in the forms of schools and academies and universities.  This is the case to such a degree that his defence of intellectualism is at times indistinguishable from a defence of institutionalized education, even if the sort of institution he envisages is quite different from the one that is currently operative.

There is nothing in Barzun’s definition of the intellectual that necessitates this narrow understanding of intellectual community, however.  The same ideas would apply to any such community, whether they were formed around oral cultures, mythologies, and histories, or around modelled skills, arts, and techniques, or around visual art, theatre, and film, or even around virtual spaces and activities.  This broader understanding of intellectual community would then be able to include the kinds of common knowledge that operate in the kitchen, the workshop, the factory, the stage, the garden, the studio, the internet, the field, and wherever else knowledge is exchanged within a community.

This more inclusive concept of the intellectual community would also go some way toward alleviating the increasing disrespect that Barzun sees being shown to intellectualism generally, because it would remove the artificial distinctions between formalized academic intellectualism and the many other forms of intellectualism that operate elsewhere.  While permitting these various intellectualisms to retain their individualities, it would recognize the commonalities between those who practise them, between the professor and the cook and the carpenter and the artist.

This does not mean, of course, that all cooks and carpenters and artists, or even all professors, are necessarily intellectuals, at least not in one important sense.  Barzun markes this sense in passing when he describes the intellect as one form of intelligence, and I would mark it much more forcefully.  For me, intellectuals are those who relate themselves to the community’s body of common knowledge in a particular way, not merely using it to accomplish a necessary task, nor merely consuming it for its own sake, but actively involving themselves in its life.  Whether the intellectual tradition be theology or cooking, gardening or mathematics, those who relate to it as intellectuals are those who abandon and discipline themselves to it like an erotic desire.

This relation to knowledge does not require any great intelligence, though it will tend to develop this faculty in its practitioners.  Neither does it require any great degree of familiarity with its intellectual tradition in advance, though this familiarity will be its natural outcome.  What it requires is a certain desire and a certain longing, not for knowledge in itself, nor even for what this knowledge might accomplish in itself, but for what the very desire for knowledge might accomplish in the one who desires.

Because it is birthed through desire, it will have no absolute way of proceeding, even if it will always be marked by the extremes of discipline and abandon.  Neither will it have any absolute relation to knowledge, even if it will always be marked by the extremes of veneration and negligence.  It will always be driven past what it is able to grasp.  It will always use the knowledge it desires against itself.  It will cope with knowledge rather than master it.  It will hack knowledge rather than assume it.  It will throw itself into knowledge rather than take knowledge into itself.  Its relation to knowledge will never be a mere uitilty, never a mere pedantry, always also a consuming eroticism.  This is the relation of the intellectual, neither to intelligence nor to intellect solely, but to a desire for which these things are only ever a means.

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Friere is concerned with articulating a means for education to bring about revolutionary action by oppressed peoples against their oppressors.  To do so, he undermines the traditional separation between the roles of the teacher and student, through what he calls dialogic education.  He does not, however, similarly problematize the categories of oppressor and oppressed to any great degree.  Though he acknowledges that the oppressed begin to resemble their oppressors, and though he acknowledges also that the oppressors can willingly choose to identify themselves with the oppressed, he maintains a sharp distinction between oppressors and oppressed, despite the fact that it functions similarly to the distinction between teacher and student that he is so determined to subvert.

Freire’s central argument is that it is necessary to have a dialogic approach to revolutionary action and to education, as opposed to an approach that employs the techniques of the oppressors themselves, and as opposed to techniques that acquiesce entirely to the felt needs of particular oppressed persons or communities.  Dialogism, as Friere understands it, is the practice of engaging in education and other activities in a way that permits the right to dialogue if not absolute equality to all the participants.  This process involves all parties coming to recognize that they are both teachers and learners simultaneously, even if people occupy certain roles during a particular dialogue.  Some people, for example, may be facilitators of a dialogue, and some people may be appointed to fulfil other tasks, and some people may have knowledge or expertise that is particularly relevant, but this does not imply that these people solely occupy the role of teacher in opposition to the others who solely occupy the role of learners.  In this way, dialogic education recognizes the provisionality and limitedness of teacher and learner roles, seeking to turn the attention of the participants away from these roles toward the particular social, political, or educational issues that they are currently addressing.

Friere does not, however, make a similar move when he addresses the distinction between oppressor and oppressed, maintaining this opposition in every case.  Yet these roles are as susceptible to subversion as those of teacher and student, the role of the teacher even being implicated in a kind of oppression in many cases.  Maintaining these roles as absolutes only draws attention to the roles themselves and distracts concern from the issues in which both oppressed and oppressors are implicated.  This does not mean, of course, that oppression should be ignored, or that the perpetrators of oppression are not responsible for their actions.  It is only to recognize that the roles of oppressor and oppressed are not absolute, that they often shift from one context to another, and that they are always more complicated than these labels are capable of expressing.  It is to recognize that any lasting solution to oppression will need to put its attention, not on maintaining the distinction between oppressor and oppressed, but in erasing this distinction as much as it is able.

I have long been reflecting on the role of the teacher within the traditional educational institution, because I have increasingly found that my beliefs about teaching and learning have come into active conflict with the role that the institution would like me to occupy and the role that my students most often expect me to occupy.  The question that arises for me most pressingly is essentially this: If, as a teacher, I subvert or reject as much of the goals, the rhetoric, the formalities, the expectations, and the mandates of institutionalized schooling as I am able, what do I actually bring to my students?

I would suggest that I really only have two things to offer my students: 1) I can offer the personal narrative of my own learning, the story of what and where and how I have learned, the story of how I have come to think and believe as I do; and 2) I can offer the network of other such narratives, written or oral, technical or personal, that I have experienced.  This means that my purposes as a teacher must also be twofold: 1) I must try to make as transparent as possible the narrative of my learning, its sources, its contexts, its growth, its development, its provisionality; and 2) I must try to make as available as possible the network of my learning, encouraging my students to engage with this network in the ways that are relevant to their own learning.

This process, despite how it may appear, most decidedly does not involve the abdication of my role as teacher, but only the elimination of the proscriptive and prescriptive aspects of schooling.  I remain, as the teacher, the one who is responsible to lead students into learning.  I abandon only the necessity of doing this within a set curriculum and of maintaining the illusion that I have mastered the subject that I am teaching.

Teaching that is primarily the imposition of a set curriculum by a supposed expert, whether driven by a government, a corporation, a school board, a university, or an individual teacher, can only ever result in schooling, never in learning.  Conversely, teaching that abandons altogether the function of the teacher, removing the experience, knowledge, learning network, and model of the teacher, will never encourage learning at all.  As a teacher, I must always be between these two poles, not teaching a subject or a curriculum, but teaching myself as a model of learning, a model that is valuable precisley because it is mine and irreplaceable, even if it must always recognize its faultiness, and frailties, and its limitations.

My friend James Shelley has just posted a quotation from Ivan Illich, one of my favourite authors.  I will not try to expand upon what Illich says.  It is, just as it is, a perfect articulation of what I know to be true of friendship and of learning and of hospitality.  Coming from James, whom I do not see nearly enough, it is also a reminder of how fragile and tenuous the possibility of this friendship is, and of how much it is worth pursuing.

I had two experiences of sharing yesterday that, while seemingly different in many ways, taught me something about how it is possible to share or introduce a place, a subject that has been turning in my head since I returned from Manitoulin Island.

My friend Chris Land came by with his young daughter in the morning, and we had a chance to walk to a downtown used bookstore together in the afternoon.  Chris is not from Guelph and had never been to this particular bookseller, so I showed him around the shop a little, and we spent some time browsing, occasionally noting a book to one another or asking each other’s opinion on a title.  Chris bought Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, which was a fairly revolutionary text for me when I read it in university.  I bought two collections of essays: George Orwell’s Inside the Whale and Other Essays, and William Styron’s The Quiet Dust and Other Writings, neither of which were known to me before I saw them on the shelves.  We both left the store well pleased with our purchases.

In the evening, I went to help my mother move a desk from the house of Bob Brown, a mutual friend.  While we were there, Bob took the opportunity to show me a little of his unique garden.  It was not the first time that I had seen it, since the Browns allow me to pick their grapes every fall, but I am almost always picking when Bob is at work, so I have never heard him explain how unique some of the plants in his garden really are.  He cultivates only those plants that are native to southern Ontario, and he tries to include as many uncommon species as he can.  Not wanting to take these plants from the wild, he notes where developers will be beginning a new project, and takes any valuable specimens from these areas before the bulldozers arrive.  From among his many interesting edible specimens, too many to mention, he was gracious enough to give me some mayapple plants (podophyllum peltatum) for immediate transplantation, and to promise me some pawpaw tree seedlings (asimina triloba) for transplantation later in the fall.  Of the two, mayapples can still be found wild in various places in Ontario, but pawpaws are almost never seen this far north any longer. Along with the sandcherry bushes (prunus pumila var. depressa) that I am trying to force grow from seeds, these new plants will make an interesting beginning to a garden of local and edible plants.

In each case, I would suggest that what was being introduced was, more than anything else, a space, a specifically local space, a locality.  In the first instance, I was the guide; in the second, I was the guided; in both, what was actually exchanged between us was a familiarity with a locality, a familiarity both with the space of a bookstore or of a garden, and, through this locality, an increased knowledge of the broader spaces of literature and of southern Ontario flora.  The sharing is not really of literature or flora, of course, not as a whole, not even as the whole of what might be shared.  It is the sharing only of those aspects of literature and flora that appear within a particular locality, a locality where one is familiar and is willing to familiarize another.  In the same way, my opportunity last week was not to introduce the Humphreys to Manitoulin, or even to everything of Manitoulin that I know.  Rather, it was an opportunity to make them familiar with a place where I am familiar, in order to introduce them to the experience of Manitoulin that is particularly mine.  They may gain a broader knowledge of Manitoulin through this experience, but this is not primarily what is being shared.  What is being shared is my familiarity with the locality.

I would argue that this understanding of sharing has implications far beyond physical space, because I think that it characterizes, or at least should characterize, every instance of sharing that takes the form of an introduction.  In terms of pedagogy, for example, I think that it is far more useful to understand the teacher’s function to be sharing in this way.  Clearly, despite frequent pretence to the contrary, the teacher is never able to introduce students to the entirety of a subject.  The teacher is never able even to introduce students to all of the possible knowledge of a subject that the teacher has to sharet.  The teacher is really only able to introduce students to a locality within a subject, a locality with which the teacher is familiar, a locality which the teacher can make familiar to the students also.  This kind of teaching does not pretend to somehow cover a subject entirely, but to familiarize a locality of the subject in such a way as to cast light on the whole, which will always remain beyond mastery of both teacher and student.

In this sense, I familarize Chris with the bookstore so that he can carry out of it something that was always larger than the bookstore in any case: the text.  Bob familarizes me with his garden so that I can carry out of it something that was always larger than the garden in any case: the plant.  Without these localities, and without a familiarity with them, taught and learned, there would be nowhere to begin discovering the things that we need to carry with us.

Earlier this afternoon I posted on Vannevar Bush’s essay “As We May Think“, an article that discusses the future of information technology from the perspective of a scientist in 1945.  It was for me one of those fabulous little discoveries that are the product of actually reading the web, and it has many elements that I would like to discuss beyond what I will be able to say in this and the previous post, but I will just strongly encourage people to read it for themselves and let these two posts be sufficient.

My favourite portion of Bush’s essay comes from the section where he is imagining a machine that might in the future enable people to manage what would essentially be digital libraries. The machine he imagines is very much like the personal computer, and the management system he imagines is like a personal internet, complete with hyperlinks, which he calls associative indexing and understands to be a more linear set of associations between texts.  These texts are all joined by a set of keywords, something like a tag system, and the texts can be joined by these words into any number of trails or paths through the mass of information that is the virtual library.

He then describes the function of the researcher in this new made of reading and writing, saying, “There [will be] a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master [will become], not only his additions to the world’s record, but [...] the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.”

I love the metaphor of the trailblazer here, and its connotations have much to recommend it, so I cannot resist applying it in the context of the internet, which Bush only partially foresees.  The trailblazer is one who identifies a trail by leaving visible marks or blazes along the way.  The path that is marked is not necessarily the only one, because the choices of the trailblazer are to a certain extent personal and idiosyncratic, but in every case there is left a definite trail, leading from one point to another in order to facilitate others in making the same journey. Further, the word ‘blaze’ is from the same root as the word ‘blazon’, which means, in heraldic terms, a personal mark or arms that identifies the bearer.  Incorporating both senses, the trail-blazer is the one who marks a path for others to follow and who marks it with a sign that identifies the one who has made it.

In terms of the internet, I imagine a way for people to mark their paths through the web, not just the random wanderings that they happen to make as they explore the forest, but the habitual and useful paths that they discover by means of these wanderings, the pathways that might enable others to walk behind them.  Just as with a physical path, these digital pathways would never be essential or absolute.  Quite the opposite, because they would also identify the one who had made them, they would always be recognizable as a personal and idiosyncratic trail, but one that the trailblazer found valuable enough to mark and to share.

I do not know if the technology to do something like this exists already, but it should.  It should be possible for me to establish my own trails, my own links through the web, rather than relying on the links that others have made for me.  It should be possible for me to share these trails with other people and to follow the trails that others have made.  It should be possible for me, not merely to track where I have been, but to track my favourite paths, to take others along these paths with me, and to have others, even those I may never meet, follow the blazes that I have left behind me. These things should be possible because, as Bush’s argument implies, in a world as full of information as ours is, contributing to knowledge has as much to do with finding ways through the information as it has to do with adding to it.

I am tired of education.  What I want is an unending conversation: where people come and go; where the disciplinary boundaries are marked only by the interests of those who happen to be present; where there is food and wine, words and ideas, mingled; where there is no regard for marks, and credits, and degrees and careers; where everyone must be prepared only to teach and to learn; where the thinking and the speaking smolder like tobacco in a pipe; where the classroom is wherever we happen to be, on the porch, in the pub, or on the hiking trail.  I want people to take this kind of conversation so seriously that they live their lives in constant preparation for it.  I want it to infiltrate everything, no matter how mundane, so that there need be no end to it.