I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not.

I know that I have written recently about the idea of change but it is a question that haunts me. There is so much in the world that needs doing and so much apathy solving nothing. I know that it is a terrible trap to think that the world can be "fixed," that someone can can install or strong arm the world into peace, prosperity and happiness. And yet I am nearing my twentieth year of schooling and working towards a PhD in the humanities and would I be more effective working in a soup kitchen or an inner city school, or trying to change policy? I received a pretty clear sign, basically was shouted at, that I am where I am suppose to be. Yet long hours in the library leave me asking existential questions about my purpose in the world.

A few weeks ago in my first year colloquium we had a speaker (one of the professors) taking about the relationship between politics and literature. His point was that politics need not be something forced nor need they be at the forefront of our every thought and action. "We embody what our politics are." In a way the very act of being a scholar is a political act. It has been repeated so many times that it has begun to sound trite, but there is some truth in the statement that there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. The world has revolved, changed, and convulsed because of the ideas of people whose only claim in life is that they are scholars. The incipient power of ideas is just more subtle and hard to trace than the crack of a gun or even the power of a hot meal. But it is there.

And if our only goal is to take care of the material needs of the world, to make sure everyone is feed and sheltered we are only providing for part of what humanity needs. Not only is thought the only safeguard against abuses of power when attempting to achieve these ends but in addition to basic needs humans yearn for truth. Truth is the end for which we were made and the intellectual life if the pursuit of this Truth.

It can be too easy to forget this when engaged in the too solitary pursuit of knowledge, to get locked in a cyclical and sterile dialogue within the discipline that can never reach the outside world. So I leave you with final words of the aforementioned professor to our class-- in everything "The world should be too much with us--live with some discomfiture in the world."