The intellectual life is in some ways necessarily lonely--in his book on The Intellectual Life: Its Spirits, Conditions, Methods, the French Dominican Friar Antonin Sertillanges insists that the intellectual life requires solitude. He is not wrong. Researchers in history, for instance, spend hours, days, years alone in mysterious musty basements, poring over documents that unveil their mystery to only the most persistent elect. And then the practice of writing takes additional hours (and days and years) of discipline and solitude before the essays or books are ready to go out into the world. But not all Christians who live the intellectual life are professional scholars, first and foremost. And unlike Sertillanges himself, many are married and have children. Some might be lawyers or pastors or doctors or missionaries or various professionals, or stay-at-home moms, or homeschooling mothers, or simply overwhelmed mothers of small children. These factors definitely take a toll on the possibility of solitude.
In other words, for most people, there are also the practical considerations of the intellectual life and intellectual work, whether done on the margins of one's day or full-time. Writers and other intellectuals are people too—they too must eat, do laundry, keep children alive, perhaps even vacuum on occasion. We all are bodies, as well as minds and souls. So how does this work, in particular, for households that include not just one intellectual but two?
That is the basic question underlying this new interview series, which the interview below kicks off. All couples interviewed in this series are parents. How does this all come together? We can assume that both challenges and blessings emerge as a result. What are they? And how does this change at different stages of life?
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Nadya Williams: I'd like to start by asking each of you to tell us a little bit about your intellectual journey: when did you first consciously realize that you are called to live an intellectual life? What did you envision this looking like? How has it turned out so far?
Charles Carman: Looking back, a few moments occur to me, though I must admit that I didn't really consider the direction I was tending as intellectual. I was homeschooled through high school, the oldest of seven children. It was a wonderful time, and I was fortunate to have found (or to have been found by?) a young scholar pursuing a double masters in philosophy and theology. He took me under his wing, and his tutelage was a challenge that I was determined to pass. At times he took me to his courses at the seminary. I remember vividly the classes on Plato and Kant. The professor was amazingly clear and winsome.
You have to imagine what happens to a young man's mind when he's exposed to Plato's third man argument or Kant's analytic a priori at around the time he is learning to drive. My mentor suffered no fools, and entertained viciousness of any sort even less. In those years, I played soccer and football, and though no pro athlete, I was better than some. Yet the mental challenge and the demand for excellence I found in conversation and debate with my mentor drew me down the path of reading and pondering. All my closest high school mates went into the military, as I had originally planned to do, but then made a last-minute lurch toward philosophy and university. It took me some time to find my feet, and I have sometimes wondered what success I would have met, had I stayed the course and gone into the serious business of war.
Things continue to go better than expected. I consider myself fortunate in the opportunities I have had — going abroad (sometimes with my wife and family) to learn other languages, studying under many excellent instructors, having the leisure to think and ponder. One of the greatest gifts has been the crew of friends found along the way.
The intellectual may live a solitary life in a lot of ways. Between going to a party and sculpting, the artist too may spend more time in craft than among the glasses and music, I suppose. But I can't say the intellectual life has been at all hermetic in my experience: too many fierce arguments about metaphysics over a fire, too many play readings full of laughter, poetry readings chased with hours of reflection, too many last-minute gatherings and formal and informal dinners, too many cups of coffee and pinches of tobacco shared between co-conspirators, and too many letters, in balance with solitary hours spent staring into the middle distance or scribbling into the margin of the page.
Tessa Carman: I really don’t think of myself as an intellectual—only as someone who likes, maybe needs, to think through things, understand things, to deepen understanding partly through writing and conversation, and to make things: poems, stories, plays. Or just someone who loves books! As a kid I was interested at different stages in being an artist, teacher, and then writer, and I suppose that combination of things brings together the way-of-being-in-the-world that I’ve grown into ever since. I’ve always needed to figure things out. (I did have a brief stint in my teen years where I thought I had figured it all out already, so I just needed to write out all the answers in a book, covering social life, politics, etc. Thankfully that stage passed.)
Age fifteen was a significant time for me, since I read a lot of things that would shape me ever after—and also on topics that I continue to be occupied with: education, technology, fairy tales, theology, poetry, British novels, theater. I was being homeschooled at the time after being in small Christian schools since first grade, and I think I felt rather free because of that. So I read and read whatever I wanted.
I think my idea of my life turned out rather similar to whatever dreams I had in high school, amazingly enough! I wanted to continue to read and write and make stories, and I wanted to resist the vision of adulthood that I often received from well-intentioned adults: of a life where one grimly set oneself to the wheel of the workaday world, and didn’t really have time for adventures or thinking, just being all “realistic” and paying bills.
But thankfully, I found other people who were weird like me in college, and there was even a fellow who thought like no one else—beautifully, precisely, generously. He was a fellow traveler at the very least, and then he became someone with whom I wanted to build a home and a family.
Maybe this is easier for the feminine spirit, but I never liked an over-specialized or utilitarian view of school or reading, such that I wanted to study things because the world is interesting, and we have a duty to have many interests and relations with the world—and maybe that’s why I liked what I read of Charlotte Mason so much.
At college I majored in Politics, Philosophy, & Economics, even though I would have been an English major most anywhere else.
Marilynne Robinson says somewhere that she read political, economic, and philosophical works not despite the fact that she wrote novels but because of it. Who wants to read a novelist who doesn’t understand how some of the basic relations of human life work? I liked that attitude. And also that she liked to read things for herself instead of taking received opinion. We can’t do that all the time, but when we can, we ought, and when we can’t, we ought to be a lot more modest in our opinions.
Nadya Williams: What kind of intellectual work does each of you do now, and what role does it play in your day-to-day life?
Charles Carman: I teach in the humanities at Regent University. My time is split between papers, articles, reading, teaching, preparing new courses, mentoring students, and too many other things.
Tessa Carman: Charles is more so the professional intellectual since he’s a university professor, and I do the creative/intellectual work of helming the education of our kids, as well as teaching (mostly online right now), and writing whenever I can. We always have conversations going on. There are things that are more the other’s purview—for instance, Charles leaves me in the dust when it comes to metaphysics, and he can go way deeper with his philosophy guys—but we’re able to keep each other fairly in the loop of what we’re both thinking about, which always blends into other parts of life. Neither of us would have been able to deal well with being married to someone who wasn’t someone we could talk to!
Nadya Williams: What role has your intellectual life played in your marriage and family life? Do you find that it affects your interactions with each other and with your children? If so, in what ways?
Charles Carman: You may safely invite an intellectual to dinner and find comfort in the fact that he will eventually have to leave. Living with an intellectual requires circumspection. Now marry him or her, add a growing pile of children, and what follows would count as the best and strangest sort of scandal to shock the public.
To explain to one's child medieval cosmology (and tell them that there's truth in it, scientism be damned); to answer when a child asks, "What's red dye doing in our food?" with "It's poison," and they ask why on earth do we put poison in our food, and reply with a brief excursion into the history of industrial agriculture, leading the dialogue to the very edge of a longer discussion on the industrial revolution; to read aloud The Lord of the Rings to your 8 and 10 year old (with the 3 year old and infant in attendance) and fail to tell of Theoden King's parting without saltwater in my eyes; to introduce your children (the same 10 and 8 year old) to parliamentary style debate and rhetorical structure and figures of speech and find later those very weapons of war turned on you, the benevolent gift-giver; to hear the selfsame children speak to the clerk at the grocery store thus: "I am fairly confident I have a good idea where the two hidden turtles are; if I tell you, might we receive the promised lollipops?"; to work out some question of philosophy, theology, literature, politics with one's wife, which at times can get heated, in disagreement or agreement; to realize that spelling out a word is a hopeless method for keeping something secret from the precocious little puzzlers and making recourse to riddling metaphors which only urges them more forcefully to decipher out the meaning; to speak Latin with my children in public, and when asked what language I'm speaking to them, replying with, "Old Italian”; to read and hone each other's essays and poems with the kind of brutal honesty that deep intimacy offers; to read the fairy tales written by our eldest daughter, celebrating and praising how the logic of fairyland is coursing through her spiritual blood at inebriating levels; to enter the silent living room, on the way to refill one's coffee cup, and finding the 10 and 8 year half way through a book, while the 3 year old has open in her own lap a copy of The Silmarillion, turning the pages with a determined seriousness to do precisely what her siblings are doing; to watch Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much with all the kids, which if you haven't watched it yet is some movie to watch with a 10 & 8 year old (and a three-year-old who has learned that apparently the phrase, "He's dead" is something to say very casually when watching movies); to live in words and in woodworking and in house-holding and in common with friends week in, week out.
Tessa Carman: Well, I’m always thinking about books! And I’m always thinking about education, which is a really practical question not only for our children but ourselves. Education is really about how we humans can live well, how we ought to be formed, and how we ought to form ourselves and our societies—how we ought to live. So I suppose if one is concerned with how to live more deeply into Christ, and how to best take care of and enjoy and appreciate and understand the things God has made and has given us, that affects every part of our lives.
Nadya Williams: What are some challenges you have found to your intellectual pursuits so far? How did you resolve these, or are you still living through them? What expectations did you have for your intellectual life before you were married, and how do you think these have adjusted over time and with circumstances?
Charles Carman: I am fortunate to teach at a university where I enjoy the students and enjoy my colleagues and have some time to write. But broadly speaking, the intellectual life within a family requires patronage and land. We make it work, and it's a mystery to me how we do it at times. It takes a lot of sharing responsibilities and time with the children, a lot of patience and grit. I'm not sure what I expected, or if my fantasies were either very interesting or well-formed.
Without going into it all, the intellectual family is, like any other rich family existence, ill-fitted to the way the world is shaped right now. It requires a scrappy attitude and friends for whom you can carry burdens and with whom you can celebrate victories, at least.
Tessa Carman: I gained a lot of confidence in getting married! And when we had our first child, I felt more confidence about writing, too, especially stories. I wanted to write for my children, as well as for our friends.
I think the challenge is always how to live with due attention to one’s duties, and to creatively adjust to what life demands at the time, and finding time for contemplation. Every season is a little different. Looking back, I did imagine having a rich life of enjoying and discovering the beauty of God’s world with my family, and that’s exactly come to pass!
Nadya Williams: I'd love to hear your pie-in-the-sky dream: What do you each dream about in your intellectual lives in the future? How do these dreams work together?
Charles Carman: My pie has been the same since my second year in college. We live with our friends, within walking distance of each other's homes. We all have gardens and animals and things to build and do with each other. We are all patronized and competent such that we needn't worry about much labor but what we want to do. We write plays, poems, stories, books. We invite others to stay at our guest cabin. We host conferences and events. There is an amphitheater for community plays and folk concerts. There is a library building. There is a root cellar. Our children learn to ride horses and write in ancient languages. Our boys read of Charlemagne in the evening and hunt in the morning, our girls sew and dance and recite poetry.
Tessa Carman: We have some writing projects we want to do together—some translation work, perhaps a children’s book. It would be wonderful to research a book together at the Bodleian. I think our big dream is simply to continue to make things as a family and to learn more things—woodworking, home preserving, cooking, music making—that we can enjoy together. I’d love to direct a play with our kids in it. (Our girls have been working on a living room Les Miserables ballet—maybe one day they can take that on the road!)
Folk art and skills are inseparable, for me, from what’s deemed “intellectual” work. The agricultural and manual arts are intertwined with what we deem “the life of the mind.” We are embodied beings, after all, and we were made for the “low” or common things—making and breaking daily bread together—and the “high” or more uncommon things—singing psalms and taking the Eucharist. We were made to seek wisdom together, and books happen to keep alive that wisdom for generations. I’m grateful for friends that I can speak to or write in person, and also for those who’ve left behind their writings. We’re called to keep the flame alive, and to become flame ourselves.