Part One: Loneliness and Solitude

 Led by R. J. Snell

Loneliness has been described by some as an “epidemic,” with severe consequences for health, flourishing, and political society. Further, despite the flurry of literature and studies on the subject, the evidence indicates that loneliness is growing, including for college students—and not just for freshmen who haven’t yet found friends on campus.

Loneliness is strange. As Olivia Laing puts it in The Lonely City, which must have hit a cultural nerve since it was named a best book of the year by NPR, Newsweek, Slate, Pop Sugar, Marie Claire, Elle, Publishers Weekly, and others, “loneliness doesn’t necessarily require physical solitude, but rather an absence or paucity of connection, closeness, kinship: an inability, for one reason or another, to find as much intimacy as desired.” Yet, as she continues, even though so many are lonely, many pretend not to be, for “loneliness is difficult to confess,” especially since it’s sometimes (wrongly) “considered a disease.”

But loneliness doesn’t seem to be a pathology, not even a transient experience; rather, it seems part of the human condition, part of what it means to be human. Ben Lazare Mijuskovic claims not only that loneliness is an aspect of having consciousness and personal identity, but that the attempt to overcome loneliness is the primary motivation for everything we do. Classical philosophers claimed that we sought happiness in every action, but Mijuskovic thinks we’re trying to escape our solitary confinement.

 This Fall seminar launches one theme for the year—Facing Life’s Challenges—in which we consider loneliness and solitude in the fall, a lack of social and political trust and capital during Intersession, and a spring seminar on suffering and loss. Human flourishing isn’t an abstraction but a concrete reality, and thus it will be found right in the middle our lives, lives which are sometimes hard, lonely, and difficult—and, yet, flourishing is still possible. 

 Like all Witherspoon seminars, we’ll read important texts—classic and contemporary—not out of curiosity or simply to learn, but in the attempt to find wisdom, to know how best to live and think and act so as to live well and flourish. And we try to seek for wisdom collegially, with friends of the mind, with any point of view considered.

Open to any and every Princeton student.

Part One: Work and Vocation

 Led by R. J. Snell

What is the point of work? An income? Prestige? Meaning? To better the world? Would we be better off if we didn’t need to work, or is labor a constituent aspect of the good life? 

 Many consider their work as closely related to their identity and purpose, as linked to a sense of self-worth. If that’s true—and not everything thinks it is—then finding “good” work is related to a good life. Moreover, if our work and our identity relate, some work might not be “right” for you, even if it might be right for someone else. Or, perhaps this is all overblown and it doesn’t much matter what one does, it’s just a job, after all.

 This Fall seminar launches a theme for the year—Finding Life’s Meaning—in which we consider the nature and meaning of work, with a follow-up spring seminar on the meaning of vocation—and how to discover one’s vocation.

Like all Witherspoon seminars, we’ll read important texts—classic and contemporary—not out of curiosity or simply to learn, but in the attempt to find wisdom, to know how best to live and think and act so as to live well and flourish. And we try to seek for wisdom collegially, with friends of the mind, with any point of view considered.

 Open to any and every Princeton student.

Led by Maura Shea

“I don’t know how to explain it.”
“I just couldn’t put it into words.”
“I have no words.”

Most of us have felt our poverty in relationship to language sometime in our lives, perhaps rather frequently. Maybe it’s while writing a paper for a class. Maybe it’s in trying to express how we feel about someone dear to us. Maybe we’ve resorted to emojis when our fingers fail to find just the right phrase to text.

What does poetry have to do with this experience?

 Emily Dickinson advises us, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” There is something about lyric poems—often short, personal, oblique, intense—and the way they seek to tell the “truth” about experience in a “slanted,” sometimes disorienting manner—that refreshes our experience of language, of others, of being itself. Lyric poetry invites a unique kind of response from us that other modes of language do not, and puts into words the kinds of human experiences that other modes of language cannot.

 People sometimes struggle to read poetry or to find pleasure in it because of past experiences of being forced to “analyze” it convincingly or come up with some kind of intelligent interpretation of it. Some are frustrated with poetry’s lack of practicality—what is it for, we wonder? Some are put off by its resistance to clear explanation—it is unnecessarily confusing, we complain. “I, too, dislike it,” Marianne Moore memorably begins her poem aptly titled “Poetry.”

 This seminar proposes a friendly, exploratory engagement with lyric poetry in hopes that, by contending with its unique demands together, we might cultivate habits of attention that help us read ourselves and the world around us better. We may even discover language that does some justice to our experiences of loneliness, gratitude, wonder—as one poet has noted: “It is by words and the defeat of words” that we learn to read the world anew.

Open to any and every Princeton student: lovers of poetry, new readers and skeptics welcome.