I knew academic writing was different than trade writing, but I was unprepared for the way reading—and consequently writing—was treated in the context of academia.

Douglas Hunter, “Book Breaking and Book Mending.”

Most essays lamenting the ways graduate school deforms minds and bodies focus on bad academic writing. Hunter considers how it habituates the ways we read. Academic reading fuels production not pleasure or transformation. I certainly find the training difficult to undo. I read for nuggets, arguments, metaphors, evidence, sources––Bestand to repurpose for my own thinking and writing. I can defend such a readerly disposition. But I long for the ability to toggle from this academic way of reading to others . . .and then back.

Pick up and read, pick up and read…I neither wished nor needed to read further. At once, with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled.

Saint Augustine, The Confessions.

But Saint Augustine did keep reading. He also kept preaching and writing. He was always in via and what he read and the notes he left mark that path. Here’s how my friend Matt Puffer puts it in his dissertation:

The North African Manichee hearer-turned-Catholic, reluctant but conscientious priest, and always- progressing bishop seems one who never arrived, at least not in his own estimation, but is always in via. Even as a seasoned bishop, he confesses to his congregation, “I am still following, still developing, still walking, still in via, still stretching out, I have not yet arrived,” [adhuc sequor adhuc proficio adhuc ambulo adhuc in uia sum adhuc me extendo nondum perueni] and thus exhorts them likewise, “Be always giving, always walking, always developing” [semper adde semper ambula semper profice].

Believing the peace that he desired was reserved for the elect, those who would see God face to face in the next life, Augustine desired little more out of this life than to make progress in faith and wisdom, in loving God and God’s image within the rational soul. And, he experienced this progress nowhere more so than through his preaching and writing. In a sermon we read, “We develop as we write, learning every day, preaching as we explore [proficiendo scribimus cottidie discimus scrutando dictamus].” Likewise, his letters record his experience: “Developing I write, and writing I develop” [proficiendo scribunt et scribendo proficiunt].

I started this blog in hopes of keeping better track of my own bibliographic biography. Twitter and Facebook had become default organizers of my online reading and thinking. There are, as some smart people have discussed, a host of problems with that. But my most immediate frustration was how poorly they organized my reading ways, so I’m going old-school with a blog.