Casaubon

What does it mean to be an intellectual? The life of the mind by definition owes something to the world which stocks the fish bowl. However, Proust wrote A La Recherche  du Temps Perdu in his cork-lined study. The tragic flaw of Moliere's Misanthope is his failure to understand his beloved Celimene who is a shameless flirt. Professor Rath, in Die Blaue Engel is a parody of the eccentric intellectual gulled into being an object of mockery and contempt, a pedant whose eccentricities turn him into a sad clown. George Eliot's Casaubon is the prototypic intellectual whose knowledge is purchased at the. cost of understanding. You may be drawn to imaginative and colorful characters but when you build your dream house, you're likely to opt for the  bricklayer over Ibsen's Master Builder Solness who falls to his death building a "castle in the air."

read "Died Young" by Francis Levy, The Brooklyn Rail

and listen to "Twenty-Five Miles From Home" by Edwin Starr