In Medias Res: A Good Day for a Good-Bye

Monday, March 20, 2006

A Good Day for a Good-Bye

[Update, March 21: There's four inches of snow outside my window. What was I saying yesterday about the first day of spring?

Previously I had a long post up here, talking about why I've decided to say good-bye to blogging and blog-reading for the time being, about my job and family situation and why they need my undistracted attention right now. On reflection, I've decided to take that post down--it was pretty confessional, even by my own standards, and perhaps I was overreacting to certain recent events. Of course, maybe I wasn't: that remains to be seen. But either way, it's probably best to let things play themselves out, at least for a little while longer.

If you really want to read what I read, fear not; I'm sure it's cached somewhere on the internet. Plus I'm saving it, and maybe will put it back up again someday. In any case, to those who read it before, I mean what I said about how much I've learned from and valued the exchanges, insights, and laughs I've gotten from blogging. I hope I can come back to it someday. But if not, and if whatever path I end up on doesn't involve a return to this or any blog, I want you all to know that I've had a blast. Thanks.]

17 comments:

Anonymous said...: Good bye and good luck

Posted by Nate Oman; Monday, March 20, 2006
Random Kath said...: I have been a long-time lurker and really enjoyed and learned from your writings, so I am very saddened to hear that you are stopping. (I also think my presence must be the kiss of death, but that's another story . . .)

This line of yours, however, made me write:

". . . I've always imagined this blog as part of my intellectual and professional position; my exchanges with other bloggers, as a part of my contribution to the life of the mind. Well, if I'm not going to be living that life, or at least if I have no idea how I'll be living it, then the blog itself is in question, at least to me. "

Just because you will not be in academia anymore doesn't mean that you will not be living the life of the mind. As long as you are a breathing, literate, inquisitive being you will always be a part of that life - you just won't be paid to do so. I know that other bloggers enjoy your contributions and insight, and no matter what happens will always do so because you are a thoughtful, intellegent person who has something to say.

I know my husband and I struggle with our own life directions everyday . . . one of the joys of being mid-30-something these days, yes? I wish you and your family all the best on your journey.

Posted by Random Kath; Monday, March 20, 2006
birdchaser said...: As WC might have said, had he lived long enough...Never, never, never, never, never give up the blog. Keep yourself out there, be mindful of your readers and how you are presenting yourself, but use the blog to help get you your next gig.

Posted by Rob; Monday, March 20, 2006
Guy Murray said...: Suffice to say, the way things have played out here at Western Illinois have made it pretty clear my whole gestalt--my notion of myself as an employable (much less tenurable!) colleague and teacher and researcher, an academic and an intellectual--just may not be workable

Russell,

I'm not sure I would fully agree that having things play out how you perceived they would or wanted was a condition precedent to actually being a colleague, teacher, researcher, academic and an intellectual. Thought I don't really know you, I've read many things you have written (mostly over at T & S), and from at least this modest guy's opinion--I think you fit nicely into all those categories. Sorry to hear about your current disapointments--but they will be further experience in your life's journey.

I hope you don't give blogging up forever. You have much to contribute, particularly to the LDS blogging world, where we need faithful intellectuals out on the front.

Best wishes to you and your family.

Posted by Guy Murray; Monday, March 20, 2006
Lee said...: Russell, I'm sad to read this. Mostly for your sake due to the disappointment that feeling that academia isn't working out for you must cause, and secondarily for the loss to the rest of us if you permanently hang up the blogging. Naturally what's going on in your flesh-and-blood life will and should take precedence over this, but hopefully you'll return (maybe in some new blog-carnation?)

I've never been one to engage in blog-triumphalism, but I do like to think that it can provide a kind of extended conversation where even those of us outside of academia can participate in the life of the mind in some kind of meaningful way.

In any event, I wish you well and based on what I can tell from your writings I predict you'll land on your feet whether it be in the academy or elsewhere.

All the best,

Lee

Posted by Lee; Monday, March 20, 2006
Anonymous said...: I'm sorry about your current disappointment in your career. However, after a couple left turns in my career plans -- bioscience to education to corporate finance -- I found: 1) something in which I excel and 2) that there can be tremendous creativity and satisfying service in any pursuit in which you excel. (An example: I coordinated seven different business plans one year to save a planned factory that now employs 3,000 people. After it's opening, I felt great satisfaction as drove by all the new houses, schools, and stores that we created.) I hope that your career changes also end up being the trade of something good for something better. There can be real adventure in finding this.

I hope you hang around. Your comments have been valuable to me, whether sharing your wisdom or my personal favorite: your riff on dogs in the "Deer Are Evil" thread on T&S.

Posted by manaen; Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Anonymous said...: Prof. Fox,
I am sorry to see that you will be giving up the blog for now. Your encouragement of my writing has been a great help, and I wish you all the best as you turn back to the far more important tasks that life has set for you. It is probably the case that everyone who blogs could probably be putting his time to better use in some way, but it is still a shame that your insights will not be available to most of us in the future.

Daniel Larison

Posted by Daniel Larison; Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Stephen said...: Again, you have my best wishes and sympathy.

Posted by Stephen M (Ethesis); Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Anonymous said...: My eyes are a little blurry and I was ready to call it a night when I felt that I should check out the blog Ethesis. I saw a link here. This is my first visit. It sounds like a lot of good is going here. I hope there is more to come. At any rate, I look forward to reading the archives. I wish you all the best!

Posted by Barb; Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Anonymous said...: Good luck!

Posted by Barry; Thursday, March 23, 2006
Sarebear said...: Hey, Russell. I've enjoyed your blogging muchly, although if blogging is what needs to go, so you can attend to other things, Godspeed to you and strength and support.

The despair I felt inside when my husband lost his job the last day of January this year . . . they didn't even call him, he went in to work as usual and they were like, dude, what are you doing here, you don't work here anymore . . .

The complete and utter collapse of feeling that your life has anything workable in the only direction(s) that you have invested SO MUCH in, emotionally, mentally, physically, spiritually, financially, time-wise; that you have put so much of YOURSELF into, and then to have it fall apart, made me and my husband feel like WE were falling apart . . .

I posted sometime around there a post or two that described how I felt, without saying that he lost the job as we did not want family to know at that time.

I even tried to kill myself a week or so after the job loss. I just felt so . . . untethered, and bereft of having any usefulness to ourselves, to what we had worked for, to our decisions that now seemed so . . pointless.

Anyway, I know I can't say for sure that everything will work.

I do know, though, that with alot of prayer, by us, our family, and others, and aLOT of agonizing, and courage, on my husband's part, and some serendipitious things (that were opportunities the Lord sent our way, AFTER the trial of our faith, and the opportunities even BECAME a trial of our faith), and much praying and agonizing over whether or not to even DARE to hope that this new, but very scary opportunity, might come true . . . and to ACCEPT, in my very bones, to the depths of my soul, that if it did NOT work out, that it would be the Lord's will . . .

That last, there, was a spiritual wrestling match of emotionally wrenching proportions; but the morning after I settled the match, the Lord blessed us with a much better situation, that we couldn't have even hoped for.

Anyway, I am not saying that it will work like this for you; February was a horrible time for me and us.

I just pray, so much, that the Lord has something really GOOD in mind for you that you might not even be able to imagine; something that will be of great worth and benefit to you and yours. That is my prayer, and also that through this time of struggle that He will send you peace and strength.

I hope I haven't offended. Or that I've created expectations of anything, but know that I KNOW how deeply difficult this sort of thing (I'm kinda guessing as to what kind of "thing" is going on, here) can be, and that we were just there, and IT HURT SO BAD. And I would never presume to say Hey, just have faith, it'll work out.

That's too simple, and insulting. Just related MY experience, is all, but it's such a personal, individual thing, these sorts of struggles and devastating events and such.

Here's a big hug, if one could be sent through the ether towards you.

Sara

Posted by sarebear; Thursday, March 23, 2006
Anonymous said...: Your blog, in its various iterations, has been a favorite of mine for quite some time; you will be missed. As for the job market, I'm not sure whether sadness or anger better captures my feelings--it seems an absurd waste for the academy to lose you. Good luck in your future endeavours.

Peter

Posted by Peter; Friday, March 24, 2006
Anonymous said...: Russell, I'm very sorry to hear you have troubles. I missed the original post so I'll just say: good luck pulling family and career and life back together into some happy form.

Posted by jholbo; Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Dan Nexon said...: Russell: I didn't see the original post so I'll just echo the last comment. I wish I had better to offer, but I hope to read your writings again... Your blog played a major role in my decision to try my hand at it. Academia is tough, particularly for political theorists, and I wish it were more fair to deserving people (such as yourself).

Posted by Dan Nexon; Friday, March 31, 2006
Anonymous said...: Good luck. It can be hard to see now, but things will work themselves out.; Monday, April 03, 2006
Anonymous said...: Just to add to email, this makes me really unhappy in a number of ways. I'm really sorry about this from multiple angles.

It doesn't add to my good feelings about academia.

Posted by Timothy Burke; Monday, April 03, 2006
Stephen said...: Russell,

Just dropping by again to note my concern and good wishes.

Stephen

Posted by Stephen M (Ethesis); Sunday, April 09, 2006

Quotes

"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

(Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams [Mariner Books, 2000], 211)

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

(J.G. Herder, Metacritique of the Critique of Pure Reason in Werke in zehn Bänden [Deutsche Klassiker Verlag, 1985-2000], 8:508, translated by Sonia Sikka)

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

(Confucius, Analects [translated by Edward Slingerland, Hackett, 2003], 2.4)

"That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you are hiding in the back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness."

(Gilbert K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy [Bradford and Dickens, 1957], 10)

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

(Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption [translated by H.H. Joachim, Oxford, 1922], lines 316a5-9)

"The man who has gone through college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work."

(Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy [Harper Perennial, 1975], 152)

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

(C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, revised paperback edition [Macmillan, 1982], 69)

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

(Shannon Hayes, Radical Homemakers, [Left to Write, 2010], 57)

"Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, / Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen. / Was man nicht nützt, ist eine schwere Last; / Nur was der Augenblick erschafft, das kann er nützen."

"What from your fathers you received as heir, / Acquire [anew] if you would possess it. / What is not used is but a load to bear; / But if today creates it, we can use and bless it."

(Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust [translated by Walter Kaufmann, Anchor Books, 1963], lines 682-685)

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

(Tom Stoppard [spoken by A.E. Houseman], The Invention of Love [Grove Press, 1997], 37)

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."

(Henry Adams, Democracy: An American Novel [Farrar, Straus, and Young, Inc., 1952], 53)

"Old men ought to be explorers / Here or there does not matter / We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion / Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, / The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters / Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning."

(T.S. Eliot, "East Coker," Four Quarters [Harcourt, 1943])

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Monday, March 20, 2006

A Good Day for a Good-Bye

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