Make Mulling Great Again
By: Helen Schlueter
Nothing – not the Odyssey, not Meditations On First Philosophy, not Hammarabi’s Code—can quite prepare you for the first year post-Hillsdale College. When I patched up boxes of books and shipped them off to D.C., I knew that the Hillsdale chapter of my life had closed, but little did I know how much I would miss my Hillsdale world.
Let me be clear: you should be excited for life after Hillsdale! This past year has been a whirlwind of events and experiences I never expected—sipping wine at midnight while overlooking the cathedrals in Poland, bonding with the busker on the Farragut North metro station who flags down the D.C. commuters every Tuesday with an instrument of the harp variety, munching on charcuterie with Swiss Guards, baking a whole chicken (if you haven’t done it, would recommend—few joys are more substantial than pulling a whole roast chicken from the oven).
However, it is also true that for me, as for some of my classmates, the first few months and perhaps much of the year, were quite gut-wrenchingly lonely. I had weekends with nothing: no plans, nowhere to go, and no strong vision of what to do. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal once said that “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Without papers, without the built-in Hillsdale friendships, without the crisp and comforting syllabi, an ever present reminder that you are doing Great Things, Pascal’s insight pierced me deeply.
And surrounded by the white walls of my sometimes pristine D.C. chambers, it made think: how often did I practice this at Hillsdale? Learning to appropriate the right kind of silence? To be “at play” with my thoughts? By this, I don’t mean simply thinking alone in a room, but cultivating a habit of thinking, the kind that used to come naturally as a child. I am constantly amazed by a child’s gift to distract himself in a boring situation with the peculiar ability to see a world in everything. Everything becomes, to quote beloved Anne Shirley, “scope for the imagination.” With all of the remarkable classes, books, events, and hobbies at Hillsdale, it is easy for the brain to feel, well, crammed; and the exhaustion from holding all the information in—from dates, to quotes, to party plans—follows.
To return to the habit of thinking, the “playing of the mind” which I am trying to articulate, let me pose a thought experiment, one proposed by a favorite literature professor: if everything was ever completely taken away from you, if you were entirely paralyzed, locked in a room, what would you have to draw upon? How long would your “intellectual provisions” last you? In other words, with what are you furnishing your interiority? I interpret Pascal’s daunting quote to require a response from us to sit with our interiority, to feel the weight and pressure of our inmost selves.
How does one cultivate a sense for this interiority? And cultivate the “mind at play” which I believe is the doorway to interiority (a topic which could generate a whole separate essay, but which cannot be developed here)? In a word: memorizing poetry. Before you immediately think “ah yes, classic. Now where did the Culture section of the Collegian go…” permit me to lay out four reasons that the Hillsdale student who wants to be prepared for the post-Hillsdale world, and for life at large, should memorize poetry.
Poetry heals time.
In D.C., as in Hillsdale, there is fragmentation and a temptation to endless business. AirPods flourish everywhere; everything is in motion; people rarely talk on the metro except to say a muttered “hello.” Time becomes far more linear and is measured by “going somewhere” and “returning from somewhere,”—the length of an Uber ride, the number of metro stops. Time also happens in chunks (I use “happens” here purposefully; part of the commuting malaise is that one feels a lack of agency in the face of time and yet also an anxiety to claim time). You have three minutes before the metro arrives. Then there is a disjointed ride where people bop in and out, and then you press through a line of people to make it to the fare machine, and then you wait for 45 seconds for the pedestrian sign, and then you do it all again. In these moments, the temptation to be busy (listening to an audiobook, scrolling, staring in blank exhaustion at nothing) becomes all too strong. The best remedy for collecting these bits of your day, dusting them off, and breathing some vim and vigor back in, is poetry.
One metro ride, I decided on a whim to re-memorize an old favorite, “The Wreck of the Deutschland” by Gerard Manly Hopkins. I cannot emphasize enough how restful it was. After a long day, I could lean back, close my eyes, and run my mind over the old familiar lines like the ease of conversation with a good friend. My previous harried metro state, in which I had precariously balanced a book on my knee trying to eke out wisdom where I could, gave way to a feeling of true peace.
Poetry builds your interior vocabulary.
Poetry has a shaping quality, and over time I guarantee that certain lines will become part of the seams of your life. For the first 20 minutes of one commute, I became fascinated by a single line from “The Wreck of the Deutschland”: “Mother of being in me—Heart!” What, I asked myself, does it mean for the heart to be the mother of being? What would a metaphysics for that look like?
Let me interject here to say that when memorizing poems, memorize the ones that are well acclaimed, yes, but perhaps most importantly, memorize the ones you like. Is there something about the image of a red wagon in the rain that you love, even if it is purely for your own delight (“The Red Wheelbarrow”)? Memorize. Do you enjoy the sound of certain lines in a poem, such as the deliciousness of saying “globed fruit” (“Ars Poetica”)? Memorize away. Have you ever wondered what life is like as an ant (“Departmental”)? Again, I say memorize.
Poetry is humorous.
On a recent plane ride, in the middle of a turbulent patch, I had a visceral realization of what a “burl of a fountain of air” is. I wouldn’t recommend trying to explain the insight to the bloke in the next chair, but the inner glow of self-satisfaction is reward enough.
Poetry is fun.
It is just one of those things, like the fact that A.J’s coffee will forever taste slightly burnt, that is true. Period.
Poetry contributes to levity.
This last reason is a summary of the two above, but I thought it deserved its own place. While reasons four and five might seem trivial, I hope that part of my defense of memorizing poetry has shown you that poetry can replace bad thinking (overthinking or ponderous and paralyzing thought-spirals) with good thinking – that is to say, restful thinking. To quote Chesterton, “Seriousness is not a virtue. [...] solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.”
To repurpose Shakespeare’s rally to virtue, “assume a virtue if you have it not,” let me say “assume a poem if you have it not.” And if you take away nothing else from this article, everything I have said can be summarized in this beautiful section from Ryan Wilson’s fantastic article, “How to Think Like A Poet”:
“To think like a poet is to seek to unite the fragments, to seek a full and unified vision of life that includes the individuality and uniqueness of each experience and of each individual and also allows for the commonality shared by individuals and experiences, the patterns that bind us together, for the poet is like the psychopomp attempting to build a bridge between worlds, and poetry is and has been, from its beginnings, not about being cool or mysterious or sad or “deep,” but about the health of the human spirit, which cannot be healthy without xenia, cannot be healthy when it denies the inner life, or the outer life, cannot be healthy when it denies the past, or the present, or the future, when it denies life, or death, the visible, or the invisible. The healthy soul, like the gracious host, must welcome every stranger.”
On second thought, perhaps the Odyssey can prepare you for life after Hillsdale after all…
Helen Schlueter | ‘24
Helen Schlueter is currently working as the Catholic Studies Program Assistant at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May of 2024 with a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy, where she spent her time singing in Chamber and Chapel choir, serving as treasurer of the Philosophy honorary Phi Sigma Tau, and working for the marriage organization of CanaVox. Through participating as a Fellow in the Roepke-Wojtyla Program and as a Fellow in the Hertog Foundation Political Studies program, she developed a love for ethics and philosophy and is particularly interested in Sex-Realist feminism and the work of Simone de Beauvoir. In her free time, she loves long coffee chats and jamming to folk music on mandolin and fiddle.
