AKMA writes with his usual refreshing candor about why, despite Margaret’s irrefutable comparison of great suspense novels and Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, one’s a page turner and the other’s snooze inducing.

Since the obvious answer is that we are naturally interested in the plight of other humans whereas the thrill of the intellectual hunt is an acquired taste, I got to thinking about the books I’ve read that combine personal narrative anda rigorous intellectual development.

The first book to pop into mind was Leon Wieseltier’s Kaddish. As he does the ritual 11 months of daily temple-going to pray for his dead father, Wieseltier pursues an obscure question — Why does Kaddish fall exactly where it does in the service? — through centuries of Talmudic scholarship. It is a question in which I have absolutely no interest, but because the quest so clearly is the way that Wieseltier is grieving, the book is quite moving.

There must be a million other examples but to play the book’s ideas have to be rigorously developed. For me, this excludes Jung’s Autobiography, Robertson Davies’ novels, anything written by Carlos Castaneda, and The Name of the Rose. Also, the works of Plato are excluded because they are, as apparently they say in golf, a gimme. What the hell, let’s also exclude any autobiography by someone famous first for his or her intellectual development, e.g., St. Augustine’s Confessions, because while those works recount how ideas were developed, they generally don’t themselves develop the ideas.

Note that all rules will be applied with strict arbitrariness.

Categories: Uncategorized dw