Most people, if they really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you but they never quite keep their promise. The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country are longings which no marriage, no travel can really satisfy. There was something we grasped at in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality. The wife may be a good wife, and the hotels and scenery may have been excellent. But something has evaded us.

The foolish person puts the blame on the things themselves. He goes on all his life thinking that if only he tries another woman, or went for a more expensive holiday, then, this time he really would catch the mysterious something we are all after.

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise or be unthankful for these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for something else of which they are only a kind or copy or echo or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find until after death. ..CS Lewis “Mere Christianity”

A friend who is doing PhD work at harvard said he’s concentrating on his research, and wants to be done soon. He said he’s feeling the unreality of it all.

I then wrote this to him:
I’m amused by your comment on the unreality of the academic world…there are many things i love, and perhaps more that I hate about academia…I
tried to keep it at arms length, avoided the politics, and served on as few committees as possible…and focused on the students..

(reply from this harvard grad student)
…i think a general trend in life is “i enjoy the work, but hate the bureaucracy”…i think that no matter where one works, some things need to be kept at arm’s length…

One other thing I’d say, connected to Simone Weil, is that I think the “habit of attention” she talks about is profoundly important, and it can be very hard to develop in graduate school. In my M.A., I had a teacher who introduced me to Weil’s essay. This professor really practiced the sort of attention to God and to studies (and also students) that Weil recommends, and it transformed the way I approached studying and the way I approached people. I began to search for a deeper kind of sustained and careful attention to books and to people. It’s sometimes been hard to practice that with the pressures of my Ph.D. program (though I’ve learned a lot of good things there as well), but the idea really did change and deepen my life.