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| photo: Seung-Eun Lee | |
Zena Hitz is a tutor in the great books program at St. John's College in Annapolis, Md., where she also lives. She has a Ph.D. in ancient philosophy from Princeton University and studies and teaches across the liberal arts. Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life (Princeton University Press, May 26, 2020) is her first book.
On your nightstand now:
My nightstand is a mess! I'm always reading too many things at once. Right now, Francis Su's Mathematics for Human Flourishing is on the top of the stack. When I started out writing, I feared that no one would understand my point of view. But in the end my experience has been opposite: there are so many kindred spirits and fellow travelers out there. Su understands that learning is for everyone, and that it makes your life better, and that's why it matters. It's a beautiful and clear book, with fun mathematical problems. I'm also always reading little bits of the Revelations of Julian of Norwich to get my mind out of the world and onto the fundamentals before I go to sleep.
Favorite book when you were a child:
As a child, reading was my escape, and I read books in piles rather than one by one. But I was definitely preoccupied with Greek mythology, and one of the favorites was D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths. I think I always loved stories that seemed to reach back and reflect on the fundamentals of things. As a teenager I developed a taste for irony, and for that reason Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was my favorite for many years.
Your top five authors:
In philosophy, Plato and Augustine, because they love the search more than the endpoint. For me, it's always been about getting lost in something, and finding the edge of my thinking where things stop making sense. In literature, Herman Melville and Flannery O'Connor are at the top; they both make the ordinary so strange and luminous. I've also always loved writers who challenge the reader fearlessly in matters of politics or social life: Malcolm X, for sure, or Andrea Dworkin, or, in a very different way, Anthony Trollope.
Book you've faked reading:
When I was in college, my best friend and I spent the whole afternoon talking when we should have been preparing for our Adam Smith seminar. We knew "the invisible hand" was important, so once we realized our situation, we found the passage and went off to class. Unfortunately, we were in class together, and when the invisible hand came up, we both said the page number in unison. We both collapsed in laughter and shame. That kept us quiet for the rest of the evening.
Book you're an evangelist for:
I promote Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels whenever I can. They're widely read, but I think they should be even more widely read! I teach in a great books program, so contemporary literature often feels like a letdown to me--but these novels are so rich and so deep, so challenging and fascinating, I won't rest until everyone has at least tried to read them. I don't know that I've ever read anything else that treats the relations between men and women so honestly, without softening any of the real difficulties.
Book you've bought for the cover:
I'm a sucker for any book that is little and cute and well-designed. I also have a taste for novelty. Probably The Penguin Book of Sick Verse is my best find, along those lines.
Book you hid from your parents:
My parents are very left-wing, and when I was in high school, I got interested in seeing the other side of things. I had my grandfather's copy of The Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater. I'm not sure I hid it from them, though; that would have taken the fun out of it!
Book that changed your life:
I read Sophocles, Oedipus the King, as a high-school student and then again as a college freshman. I think it was through that book that I understood that for some books, every line matters, every line is packed with some wisdom or insight waiting to be harvested. Once I saw that, I wanted to spend my life with books--there was nothing so exciting!
Favorite line from a book:
Julian of Norwich has "For the soul may do no more than to seek, to suffer, and to trust." I think about this all the time; it's such a simple account of human limitation and human possibility. I also like poetry; my favorite line might be Wordsworth: "The winds come to me from the fields of sleep." It's a line of compounded mystery: winds--which you can't see--blowing from the cemetery and the womb, where the people of the past and future lie hidden.
Five books you'll never part with:
I have a special love for the stories and poetry of the Bible. And no book has the power for me that the New Testament does. The Bible is in fact its own library--it collects books of various kinds: history, philosophy, literature, poetry--so if I've got that, you can give me a rotating shelf of four works of fiction and nonfiction and I'll be satisfied!
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
I've read the Jane Austen novels so many times that it can be hard for me to find fresh things in them. So, I'd say Emma or Pride and Prejudice, so that I can take the delight in the wit and the sudden plot twists as I used to.