Days of feeling tired and distressed. Found some energy back in a wonderful biographical interview to Natalie Zemon Davis in the volume Visions of History. Particularly when she talks about vocation–and going beyond the profession’s trivialities that end up causing that distress:
Young people need to get jobs. People have to have a place in which to teach. There is a workplace. But as I said to my colleague Carl Schorske when I came to Princeton, “You know, I really think of myself in a calling or vocation” (…) And although the word intellectual is perhaps more appropriate for his generation than for mine, I’m more comfortable thinking of myself as an intellectual. The only trouble with the word is that it doesn’t suggest the artisanal side of the historian’s work identity. But I’m more comfortable with intellectual than professional and with vocation rather than career. A career has a certain fixed curve that the profession decides–when you get your honors and so on. I don’t think those are totally unimportant. There are certain rituals you need in order to know what a field is and where it’s going. You need elder statesmen and stateswomen who can stand for something. I’m not trying to do away with all ritual or structure, but I’m saying that you’ve got to see beyond it. If there’s nothing beyond it, it’s not worth it to me. Life is really more than our little ponds.