After reading Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots (which is itself an inevitable result of reading enough Alan Jacobs, Matthew Crawford, and Paul Kingsnorth, who all cite her on various key points), I think this brief quote may summarize the weightiness and urgency of this book:
The acquisition of knowledge brings us closer to the truth when it is knowledge of what we love, and not in any other instance (Simone Weil, The Need for Roots, trans. Ros Schwartz [Penguin, 2023], 195).
The pressing question: how can we learn to love the our subjects, and, even more, teach our students to love them?