I love this passage from Geraldine Brooks People of the Book, where the main character, Hanna, a rare book conservationist, talks about her career:

“I’m not ambitious in the traditional sense. I don’t want a big house or a big bank account; I don’t give a rat’s about those things. I don’t want to be the boss of anything or manage anyone but myself. But I do take a lot of pleasure in surprising my stuffy old colleagues by publishing something they don’t know. I just love to move the ball forward, even if it’s only a millimeter, in the great human quest to figure it all out.”

This passage, which I just love, because it names something I know but haven’t noticed I know before, strikes me hard, and at least three ways.

First, it reminds me why I love working in academia—these are my people. Not ambitious in the traditional sense. The conversations aren’t “thing” conversations. And, at our best, we aren’t talking about knowing, but about finding out.

Second, a lot of my friends and colleagues didn’t understand why I left a very good university position to come to a small Christian college. Me neither. It’s taking years of reflection to figure it out. But I know part of it has to do with being in a community of people where there is much pleasure in quietly moving the ball forward. I work with a lot those who want to make some kind of very small, very high quality difference. Who see human experience as a whole, a thing to be leaned into and improved in some way. This work is mostly unsigned, unattributed, unclaimed.

Third. Genius is, I think, always pushing against, not moving with. It works by surprise, from the margins. It likes to up-end. There’s something cranky in Hanna, something of the uber-iconoclast, the pain in the ass. The artist. This is about the ambition of art, what it hungers for, what it grips.

And it’s cycling in Spain, thinking about Lorca’s bones, and war, Al-hambra’s tiles and their secret language, and how the words of the world got to be the words they are. It’s the cello suites. The tango. Working today, word by word, uphill, into the wind. It’s about Vuillard and a simple salad and making the bed every day, carrying the dog up and down the stairs, sending the work out, reading, and listening, and looking, and noticing, heart open. It’s about sitting quietly in a room, not-thinking and not falling asleep. It’s about A.’s lemons on her windsill, the ambition of beauty.