Alain de Botton on Why Academia is Not the Utopia for Curious Minds and Why He Refused to be Specialised
Alain de Botton, a British prolific writer on diverse subjects such as travel, sexuality and architecture, had a bumpy journey before he arrived at the kind of writer that he is now. After realising that he is not made to be a filmmaker, he steered his vocational ship into the academia. It was a natural choice for de Botton, after all, he loves reading and writing. But years later into academia, while he was completing his PhD at Harvard, he became disillusioned:
¨Like many young people with cultural, aesthetic interest, I thought that academia was going to be my nirvana, because these guys pay you to do stuff that you like to do anyway, reading books, and writing. But I quickly realized that there was a massive deception going on there. Academia has brought together ways to make pleasant things as unpleasant as possible. One reason is that academia has the problem of over-subscription. To deal with that, they make people jump through as many hoops as possible, so that only the most determined survive. Ultimately, I felt that the sort of thing I was interested in does not need to be interpreted in an academic way. The academic stricture, the footnoting, etc, took away from the force of what I tried to say¨.
Leaving academia, de Botton knew he would continue to write but he felt at loss as to what kind of writer he wanted to be. He just could not see himself fit into any conventional category of a writer:
"I was really confused. When people say you want to be a writer, people think it means you are a novelist, and then there are subgenres of non-fiction, but they have much less status, and they are often occupied by so-called professionals. I didn't really know how I would fit in. But the career of one person in particular has been absolutely decisive for me, that is the French theorist, essayist and writer Roland Barthes, who liberated me. I remember as a young man I had all his books on my shelf, and I would look at them to gain inspiration, just like a religious person who looks at the icon to fill themselves up. He gave me courage. Not so much what he wrote, but the form, the inventiveness. He was a man who might write a beautiful essay on photography, then he might move on to write about Japan, or Balzar. I felt like this is the sort of life that I would like to lead.
Following Roland Barthes as a role model, de Botton resolved to be an intellectual nomad and refused to rest. Since his first book at the age of 24, de Botton has authored books on sex, travel, architecture, etc. As the Canadian writer Sheila Heiti observes,
¨In an age of increasing specialisation, some of our more fascinating writers seem to be those who refuse to specialise; who wilfully (and perhaps naively) try to stand in a space that architecture, economics, biology and literature might all inhabit-- or to create such spaces.¨
In Roland Barthes, de Botton also recognised the kind of inventive style that suits his nature. In a sense, De Botton was not striving for originality in his writing, but for suitability, and yet because every human is inherently unique, somehow finding what suits oneself is the exact path to originality. Sheila Heitim, in praising de Button´s first book On Love, says:
¨It seems that the twenty-four-year-old Alain de Botton strove in the opposite direction of many young writers attempting their first book. Instead of trying to create a story of great uniqueness, full of wondrous new particularises--instead of engineering a surprising narrative - he did the reverse and ended up with something much more unique: he wrote a love story that is a map -- the ur-love story, the most predictable love story given the context of his culture and time. While literature is often used as a map, it is rarely written as one.¨
"I was really confused. When people say you want to be a writer, people think it means you are a novelist, and then there are subgenres of non-fiction, but they have much less status, and they are often occupied by so-called professionals. I didn't really know how I would fit in. But the career of one person in particular has been absolutely decisive for me, that is the French theorist, essayist and writer Roland Barthes, who liberated me. I remember as a young man I had all his books on my shelf, and I would look at them to gain inspiration, just like a religious person who looks at the icon to fill themselves up. He gave me courage. Not so much what he wrote, but the form, the inventiveness. He was a man who might write a beautiful essay on photography, then he might move on to write about Japan, or Balzar. I felt like this is the sort of life that I would like to lead.
¨In an age of increasing specialisation, some of our more fascinating writers seem to be those who refuse to specialise; who wilfully (and perhaps naively) try to stand in a space that architecture, economics, biology and literature might all inhabit-- or to create such spaces.¨
In Roland Barthes, de Botton also recognised the kind of inventive style that suits his nature. In a sense, De Botton was not striving for originality in his writing, but for suitability, and yet because every human is inherently unique, somehow finding what suits oneself is the exact path to originality. Sheila Heitim, in praising de Button´s first book On Love, says:
¨It seems that the twenty-four-year-old Alain de Botton strove in the opposite direction of many young writers attempting their first book. Instead of trying to create a story of great uniqueness, full of wondrous new particularises--instead of engineering a surprising narrative - he did the reverse and ended up with something much more unique: he wrote a love story that is a map -- the ur-love story, the most predictable love story given the context of his culture and time. While literature is often used as a map, it is rarely written as one.¨
In summary, the disillusionment was the emotional fuel that propelled de Botton to acknowledge the difference between his expectation of academia and the reality of his unfitness in it. But de Botton is not only brave to discard what no longer fits him, but also lucid enough to realise that the shortcut to achieving one´s calling is by feeling the resonance in others´ works, in his case, it is Roland Barthe´s works, then imitating their ideal form, and latching on to it until its pull of gravity carries him to the fertile land of authenticity. Complementing this reading with his confession on why film-making is not for people-pleaser.
Sources:
- Podcast interview on Design Matters with Debbie Millman
- New York Times interview: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/books/review/alain-de-botton-by-the-book.html
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