Lanier writes: I want to read and study and learn as much as I ever did. To set goals and make schedules. I want to broaden the borders of my mental horizons, feed my soul upon the wisdom of the ages. Since my schooldays were left behind I’ve realized what tenacity is required to continue your own education beyond the accountability of classes and curriculum. It’s so easy to get caught up in the revolutions of our spinning society, churning out our quota of industry, till we’re much too tired—and too busy anyway—to think of indulging in the extravagance of self-education. But is it really all that modern of a problem? In 1836, Eliza Farrar urged, “Self-education begins where school education ends.” Perhaps the cultivation of the mind has always needed validation, along with all the arts. Perhaps beauty has always striven with productivity.

A few summers ago, during a soulful reading of Sheldon Vanauken’s A Severe Mercy, I found my heart completely taken by the account of the Oxford years that he and his wife experienced: reading by the Thames, having lofty discussions on prayer and Christianity, rubbing shoulders with—actually becoming quite devoted life-long friends with—C.S. Lewis. A fierce longing for all the ‘intellectual pleasures of the senses’ leapt like fire within me, and at the counsel of a wise older friend, I realized that I needed to give place to these sweet desires among all the other loved duties of my happily-married life. In good faith, I used birthday money to order a box full of new books: Dorothy Sayers, Charles Williams, G.K. Chesterton, Madeleine L’Engle. And when they came, I tore through the wrappings and went over them with reverent hands, savoring the anticipation of the riches they held. It was greater than a feast spread before me there on the kitchen table.

…I yet bear in my heart and mind the wealth of those days. The satisfaction of making time in a full life for the pleasures of serious reading. The glad identification in another’s eyes, the widening perception of another’s viewpoint. And the beautiful assurance that the lifelong pursuit of knowledge is indeed a worthy chase. We may not have been at Oxford, spread out on blankets in Christ Church Meadow or studying in the Bodleian. But the riches were ours all the same. And I seriously doubt that at that season in our lives we could have been one bit happier.