Gilbert Highet (1906-1978), "The Scholarly Life,"
The American Scholar 41.4 (Autumn, 1972) 522-524, 526-529 (at 522):
It is a curious life we lead, the life of
scholarship. Difficult and demanding, most
certainly; frustrating, far too often for comfort; poorly rewarded in material terms;
and calling for a great deal of spiritual
stamina. Sometimes I ask myself how many
of my colleagues, given an opportunity to
change their careers and take up some quite
different vocation, would accept, and abandon the world of scholarship.
Id. (at 523):
Consider first the life of learning. It is
based on certain principles which people
outside the academic field seldom fully understand or appreciate.
The first of these is devotion: devotion
and diligence. The Germans pithily call it
Sitzfleisch, "flesh to sit on," because they admire the willpower that keeps a man at his
desk or laboratory table hour after hour,
while he penetrates inch by inch to the
heart of a problem. But many of us now
find that Sitzfleisch is not so important as
what newspapermen call "legwork" — the
patient, unremitting pursuit of a set of facts
from book to book, from one library to
another, sometimes even from one country
to another, until they are caught and nailed
down.
Id. (at 528-529):
Love of one's subject is best shown
through constant intellectual renewal. The
young are narrow-minded. The young are
shortsighted. They cannot, without an exceptional effort, conceive how large and
complex an important intellectual discipline is, what a wealth of material and
multiplicity of problems it embodies; the
teaching they get in high school tends to
make them superficial, and to suggest to
them that arduous long-term thinking and
research are not necessary for higher
mental achievement; they are bombarded
by the outer world with trivial novelties
in news, fashions, and entertainment; their
inner life is distorted by the temptations of
sex and drugs; and they tend to believe
that we, their teachers, are "sot in our
ways" and go on placidly doing the same
sort of nothing year after year.
It is our duty therefore, indeed it is
one of our chief functions as teachers, to
show them that the world of the intellect
is in constant flux, that our own minds are
always meeting and grappling with new
challenges, and that the most important
part of our work is discovery and reinterpretation.