By Special Request
On Keeping Yourself Unfit for the Modern World, Mach 2
You received this email because you subscribed to, or were forwarded, The Comic Muse, excursions in the world of art and beauty conducted by philosopher and novelist Daniel McInerny.
In early June 2025 I will release a new short audio course on the theme of “poetic experience”—a way of discovering truth through imagination and the “heart.” As Pascal said, “The heart has its reasons that reason knows not of.” Watch this space for more details, and drop me a note if you’d like me to put you on the list of folks I will alert when the course drops.
My Jane Austen Shelf
On June 1, 2023, almost exactly two years ago, I published the most popular post I have ever posted here on Substack. It was entitled “On Keeping Yourself Unfit for the Modern World,” and though it was written urbi et orbi (“for the city and the world”), its original inspiration came from recent graduates from the college where I teach philosophy, Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia, who had asked me for a reading list to take into their post-graduate lives. This graduation season some students asked me again for such a list, and so it occurred to me that it was time to update the post.
This afternoon at a meeting, one of my Christendom colleagues told the story of a student who said to her, “When I try to read a book on my own, I find it so hard—I feel like I need a teacher to help me.” We faculty lamented this attitude, because we take one of the ends of a liberal education to be that of giving students the tools to read difficult books on their own.
But the student’s lament wasn’t wholly misguided. There’s a paradox when it comes to reading, and to education in general: one becomes independent only by relying on a tradition. One does need a teacher—at least at the beginning. The apprentice does need the master to show the way. The books on the list that follows all in their different ways form part of an intellectual tradition that began in the ancient world, took on a new, supernatural dimension with the coming of Christianity, and continues to this day as a tiny-but-mighty minority voice—even in the midst of highly secular, technologized, utilitarian world increasingly hostile to both philosophical wisdom and Christian revelation. My students have been formed by this tradition in the course of their studies at Christendom College, but now, as graduates, they are ready to be formed by our tradition as more independent readers and learners.
One definition of philosophy I like to give my students is “live mind encountering live mind in live conversation.” But I am quick to add: one can converse with a live mind even among the dead. That is because mind is not brain activity; it is a spiritual activity, and so does not cease with the death of the body. So how can we converse with the mind of Aristotle or Dante or Jane Austen, or even the mind of a physically live person we have never met? You guessed it: through their works. Their minds are present in the books they wrote.
These books are now your teachers. These books (and countless more unlisted) will now show you the way to wisdom.
May you always continue to read them,
Dr. McInerny
Here now is the original post, On Keeping Oneself Unfit for the Modern World, with the reading list updated…
Some of you have asked me for a list of readings, books that, in the years ahead, as family/vocational and work commitments pile up, will help keep you in the mindset of your Catholic liberal education at Christendom College.
I am honored that you would make this request of me, and I hope you will find the following suggestions helpful.
However, instead of a simple reading list, I want to offer you some principles of the mindset required to keep yourselves unfit for the modern world you are now entering—in the context of which I will recommend some books (and other things).
But wait a minute. Unfit for the modern world?
“There, headmaster, with all respect, I differ from you profoundly”
At the end of Evelyn Waugh’s novella Scott-King’s Modern Europe—my first book recommendation—Scott-King, a middle-aged classics master at an English boys prep school, has a conversation with his headmaster about course assignments for the next term:
“You know,” [the headmaster] said, “we are starting this year with fifteen fewer classical specialists than we had last term?”
“I thought that would be about the number.”
“As you know I’m an old Greats man myself. I deplore it as much as you do. But what are we to do? Parents are not interested in producing the ‘complete man’ anymore. They want to qualify their boys for jobs in the modern world. You can hardly blame them, can you?”
“Oh yes,” said Scott-King. “I can and do.”
The headmaster then endeavors to convince Scott-King to give up teaching classics (“Greats”) and take up, perhaps, history, “preferably economic history.” Scott-King turns him down—as Bertie Wooster would say, “like a bedspread”:
“No, headmaster.”
“But, you know, there may be something of a crisis ahead.”
“Yes, headmaster.”
“Then what do you intend to do?”
“If you approve, headmaster, I will stay as I am here as long as any boy wants to read the classics. I think it would be very wicked indeed to do anything to fit a boy for the modern world.”
“It’s a short-sighted view, Scott-King.”
“There, headmaster, with all respect, I differ from you profoundly. I think it the most long-sighted view it is possible to take.”
The Long-Sighted View
One way of describing the education you have just completed at Christendom College is to describe it as an effort to make you unfit for the modern world.
By “modern world” I mean the world insofar as it is no friend of Christ; the world insofar as it has rejected the notion of any reality that transcends physical nature; the world insofar as it strives to master and control nature via technological manipulation; the world insofar as it is devoted to power and prestige and money and sensuality—and consequently, the world as it is filled with anxiety, banality, ugliness, and sin.
It is a short-sighted view of education, and of life, to seek to make a person fit for such a base and ephemeral world.
So, in the spirit of your Christendom education, let us continue to take the long-sighted view. The view that sees both education and the adventure of our lives as grounded in transcendent realities, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, especially as those realities are found most perfectly in God.
An important part of this long-sighted view is to love the world you are not fit for, and to love it passionately. To love it enough to want to evangelize it, so as to “restore all things in Christ.”
To love the world effectively, however, one must cultivate an interior life and a set of habits able to resist the incessant cries of the world to conform to it.
A million things might be said here. But, as I have been your professor of philosophy, I am going to play the part of your professor one last time and suggest three habits of mind to help keep you unfit for the modern world. These are contemplative habits—which of course are not solely intellectual, but which always involve the appropriate disposition of the heart.
Three Contemplative Habits to Cultivate Across Your Entire Life
1. Daily meditative prayer with the Scriptures
2. Reading books that challenge your mind, not forgetting about fiction
3. A mindset of childlike wonder
Contemplative Habit #1
Daily Meditative Prayer with the Scriptures
Rejoice in your divine filiation. In baptism, you became a son or daughter of a loving and merciful Father God who wants, more than anything, to spend eternity with you. To achieve this, you will need to become a saint. Which means living deeply an intimate friendship with Christ. That will take a lot of spiritual growth. And for this growth, you will need a growth mindset—in every area of your life, but especially in your interior life. Whatever talents God has given you, you can develop them. Whatever opportunities he has afforded you, you can grow in them. Nothing is “fixed” absolutely. Don’t allow yourself to think that you “must” be a certain way and that you cannot improve. This is a lie of the evil one.
Go to YouTube and search on “growth mindset” and you can get up to speed in just a few minutes on the distinction between a growth and a fixed mindset. It’s well worth doing.
Which brings me to my first suggestion. Develop a habit of contemplative prayer with the Scriptures (daily, slow, mindful, silent meditative prayer, treasuring the amazing story of our salvation)—as the bedrock of your Plan of Life.
Perhaps the day’s Gospel in the morning
and a few minutes with Acts/Epistles or the Old Testament at bedtime, followed by a good Examination of Conscience.
And here are some suggestions for further spiritual reading:
St. Teresa of Avila, Life, The Way of Perfection, and The Interior Castle
Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (try to find the Ronald Knox translation from Ignatius Press)
St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life
St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul
Anything by Pope Saint John Paul II. Maybe starting with Crossing the Threshold of Hope.
Anything by Pope Benedict XVI. In particular his Jesus of Nazareth series; I am also partial to his encyclical Spe Salvi. Look also for his occasional talk, “The Feeling of Things, the Contemplation of Beauty”
The sermons of St. John Henry Cardinal Newman. Each year on Good Friday, read his devastatingly moving sermon, “On the Sufferings of Christ in His Passion.”
Anything by Monsignor Ronald Knox, perhaps beginning with The Mass in Slow Motion. Msgr. Knox also did a translation of the Vulgate. Evelyn Waugh wrote a biography of Knox simply entitled Ronald Knox.
Dom Eugene Boylan, This Tremendous Lover
Anything by Father Jacques Philippe, perhaps beginning with Searching For and Maintaining Peace and Interior Freedom
And here are my two favorite podcasts on the spiritual life and Catholic culture:
Father James Searby, Holiness for the Working Day
Bishop Robert Barron, Word on Fire Podcast
Contemplative Habit #2
Reading Books That Challenge Your Mind, Not Forgetting Fiction
Do you want to grow in every facet of your being?
Read.
Do you want to excel in everything you do?
Read.
Do you want to be a lifelong learner, growing constantly in wisdom and grace?
Read.
Read every day. All day. As much as you can.
But don’t just read anything. Read books, in every area in which you read, that will challenge you and help you grow. (This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t read “lighter” fare. Only that such lighter fare should be used to relax your powers from more strenuous effort.)
Don’t Forget About Fiction
The reading of serious fiction seems to be a dying art. Especially among men. I won’t speculate here on the reasons for this, I will simply say, if you are a man reading this, I exhort you especially to develop or maintain the habit of reading fiction throughout your entire life. How can we imagine what it means to live the good life if we don’t cultivate the imagination? We need stories of all kinds, of course, including from streaming services and films. But fiction, the greatest fiction, gives us storytelling of the highest order, and our lives are diminished if we don’t take advantage of the highest quality storytelling.
Where does one begin to recommend books?
Perhaps it’s best to begin by recommending some of my favorite authors and their books:
Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Scoop, A Handful of Dust, Helena (historical fiction about St. Helena’s hunt for the true Cross), Brideshead Revisited (of course), The Sword of Honor Trilogy. Waugh’s biography of St. Edmund Campion, Edmund Campion, is also a classic. Waugh’s fiction will help you imagine what it means to be unfit for the modern world.
Jane Austen: read all six of her great novels, over and over again, until the funeral home director says you must close your book. The late great Alasdair MacIntyre has said, Austen gives us the last full imaginative picture of a social world living the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues.
P.G. Wodehouse. The greatest comic writer the English language has produced. Almost 100 novels and collections of stories. Enjoy them all. A lifetime of laugh-out-loud pleasure awaits you. You’re welcome.
Fyodor Dostoevsky. You probably read Crime and Punishment in school. Now you’re ready for The Brothers Karamazov. Take a deep breath and plunge in.
Leo Tolstoy, War & Peace. Nabokov rightly praised Tolstoy’s “fundamental accuracy of perception.”
Flannery O’Connor. One of the great Catholic writers of the 20th century. For you writers and literati out there, her collection of essays, Mystery & Manners, is required reading.
Charles Dickens. Melodramatic, yes. Masterful, yes. Joyful, yes! Begin with David Copperfield. Or Pickwick Papers. Or Nicholas Nickelby. It doesn’t matter. Just begin.
Anthony Trollope. Victorian-era life among leisured Anglicans. Sound dull? It isn’t. Start with The Warden and then go straight on through The Barchester Chronicles.
Daniel McInerny, The Good Death of Kate Montclair (It’s my Open Letter. I can list what I want to!)
Non-fiction that will help keep you unfit for the modern world (this is what you specifically asked me for, Bridget McCaughey!)
Iain McGilchrist. The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things. The most important books I’ve read in the last decade, at least. Will break open for you what makes the modern world work, or not work, and some of the habits of attention and action needed to resolve the crisis. These are enormous books but eminently readable.
Rene Girard. A perceptive diagnostician of the human problem. Girard can be difficult, though. Maybe begin with the primer on Girard by Father Elias Carr, I Came to Cast Fire: An Introduction to Rene Girard. Then turn to Luke Burgis’s book on Girard’s notion of “mimetic desire,” Wanting. Then go on to Girard himself, beginning with Deceit, Desire, & the Novel.
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly. Perennially illuminating.
Nicholas Lasch, The Cult of Narcissism and The Minimal Self. 90s social criticism still so relevant today.
Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos. A parody of a self-help book that diagnoses what is wrong with modern pseudo-scientific understanding of reality. Percy was a Catholic novelist and philosopher. See also his essential collection of essays, Signposts in a Strange Land. His fiction is intriguing, too. Begin with The Moviegoer.
Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft and The World Beyond Your Head. Essential reading for how to manage life in our technological age.
Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed and Regime Change.
Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture and In Tune with the World: A Theory of Festivity. Also his essays, “The Philosophical Act,” included in the Ignatius Press edition of Leisure; and “Learning How to See Again” in Only the Lover Sings.
And, if you really want to keep your philosophical chops sharp: Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (and everything else he’s written); Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, Source of the Self, and A Secular Age; Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self; C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man.
Robert Sokolowski, Phenomenology of the Human Person. Msgr. Sokolowski, my old teacher at The Catholic University of America, gets my vote for the greatest Catholic philosopher—and maybe the greatest philosopher, period—now living.
Wladimir Weidle, The Dilemma of the Arts. Out of print. Hard to find. Worth the effort.
William F. Lynch, Christ and Apollo: The Dimensions of the Literary Imagination. A classic.
Philip Rieff, My Life Among the Deathworks. Wildly idiosyncratic, powerful analysis of our cultural ills.
Daniel McInerny, The Way of Beauty: A Philosophical Reflection.
Trying to figure out your professional life?
Read Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You. I recommend this book to my kids and to students all the time. Wish I had read it when I was your age.
And I also recommend…
The Optimal Work Podcast featuring Dr. Kevin Majeres. A Catholic psychologist from Harvard talks about how to work optimally, with a growth mindset.
Deep Questions Podcast with Cal Newport. Another great podcast about what it means to live and work deeply in our technological age.
Contemplative Habit #3
Maintaining A Mindset of Childlike Wonder, Curiosity, Playfulness, & Joy
Our Lord asks us to be like little children. This means maintaining a childlike attitude of trust in our Father God. Trust that he and his creation are good, meaningful, the source of adventure and excitement and joy. The world wants more than anything to take away from you this attitude of childlike trust, and the wonder, curiosity, playfulness, and joy that come along with it. Here are just a few ways of resisting the temptation to stop trusting the Father.
Return again and again to the works of G.K. Chesterton. There are many collections of his short pieces, pieces that can be read in just a few minutes. He also wrote many books that survey the crisis of the modern world, such as What’s Wrong the World. He also wrote two classics of Christian apologetics, Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. Chesterton, more than any other modern writer, embodies what it means to live childlike wonder, curiosity, playfulness, & joy, especially as grounded in the Faith. Go to Ignatius Press or a good Catholic brick-and-mortar bookstore to find his work. Much of it is free online. He also wrote some great detective fiction in the Father Brown Mysteries.
On the importance of the mindfulness necessary to open up to wonder, curiosity, playfulness, and joy, see Catholic psychologist Dr. Greg Bottaro’s Catholic Mindfulness. He also has a podcast called Being Human.
The works of Josef Pieper mentioned above.
John Cleese’s delightful little book, Creativity (can be read in an hour)
Activities That Help Maintain the Childlike Mindset of Wonder and Curiosity:
Read aloud with family and friends. Jane Austen and Dickens and P.G. Wodehouse are especially good for this. Read aloud to your children, or nieces and nephews, the nonsense verse of Hilaire Belloc.
Get outside: walk, plant a garden, hike, visit an arboretum, build something with your hands.
Throw a dinner party. No one throws them anymore, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. When you do, introduce, lightly, during the meal, a little structure. Ask guests for a “party piece”: the recitation of a poem (memorized or not), an excerpt from a favorite novel or work of nonfiction, a “live” movie review, a funny anecdote. Alternatively, introduce a good question and go around the table with the answers, e.g. “What’s the best book/movie you’ve read lately?” “What positive things do you know that are happening in the world right now?” “What’s the most interesting place you have ever visited outside of your hometown?” The point: to generate real conversation at the table.
Read great poetry. And memorize it! Memorize a few Shakespearean sonnets or a few dramatic monologues every year. You should never stop reading—and seeing—Shakespeare.
Visit art museums, go to concerts and live theatre.
Play live music and sing with family and friends
Exercise + Good Nutrition + Good Sleep (the adage abides: mens sano in corpore sano, “a sound mind in a sound body”)
The practice of digital minimalism is a special category of concern for anyone desiring a contemplative life. Learn how to ween yourself away from digital media every moment a hint of boredom sets in.
Begin by reading Cal Newport’s book, Digital Minimalism, as well as his Slow Productivity
A Final Word
All three of these contemplative habits assume an atmosphere of interior and exterior silence: a priceless commodity in our noisy, distracted modern world. On this theme, see Cardinal Robert Sarah’s wonderful book, The Power of Silence. Silence is indispensable. From a habit of profound silence, one is disposed to develop habits of attention and contemplation.
You might be wondering: Do I live these suggestions and principles to perfection?
Of course not. I struggle just like you do. But without a clear vision of the ideal, no growth is possible.
Now, as you launch your post-graduate journeys, please know that you remain in my prayers. I pray every day for all my students, past, present, and future.
And please do keep in touch and let me know how things are going!
Yours in Truth, Beauty, and Goodness,
Dr. McInerny
Beauty & Imitation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts by Daniel McInerny
I’m many years out of grad school and often have had the wish of a professor to guide me through my reading life. After reading your list I’m glad to see that my education served me well enough to have read along a path close to the one you have suggested here. I’m excited for the diversity you have listed here and also to read more out loud with my family! Thank you!