Once upon a time, when I was a young painter just beginning a graduate program, a generous pastor and theologian invited me into a mentoring relationship when he noticed I was reading James Atlas’ biography of the American poet and writer Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966). Lou Reed had written a song I liked—“My House” on The Blue Mask, released in 1982—about his friend and teacher Schwartz, so I wanted to know more about Schwartz’s life. My mentor and I soon discovered we shared an interest in listening to music, and the following Christmas, he gifted me a copy of Schwartz’s In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.
At that time, I was also struggling with what I understood to be my calling as a young artist, and I was still a long way away from thinking about vocation as a collection of concepts. My mentor counseled me to think of my calling as service and doxology—that is, an expression of praise to God—and was very firm about the relative spiritual value of my calling, regardless of the perceived lack of its economic potential. He read mostly philosophy, and I read mostly critical art theory, but we found common ground in the biography of a cultural legend. Our shared exploration illustrates how reading outside the canon of vocational topics is good for creating opportunities to have interesting conversations that can lead back to vocation.
Readers interested in vocation certainly have ready access to a growing collection of texts and resources. The field’s “canon” includes writers ancient and contemporary, religious and secular, and scholarly and popular. Consider your own reading list on vocation and how its titles have been recommended to you. You’ve probably made this list quite intentionally. Maybe you’re motivated by the desire to acquire expertise.
But what can be explored and found by taking a more serendipitous approach to such reading? What can be gained by acquiring ideas and insights outside this canon? I’m not suggesting we dismiss or reject the canon—its accepted authority provides a regenerative and practical body of truths. Nor am I in favor of mining what might be underground sources at expense of the canon. I’m simply asking you to consider being open and playful about your choices, in a way that genuinely reflects your broader interests in vocation.
My scholarly reading is marked by such serendipity, so much so that I can’t regard its occurrences as anything but a gift. A force outside myself seems to nudge me to serendipitous choices. Much of my reading is, of course, directed by intentional choices of recommended or referenced texts. But what I read also come to me regularly through incidental touchpoints. I have a habit of casually rummaging in bookstores, and I am intrigued by obscure and vaguely remembered tangents—usually a name—of an intellectual interest, such as those tangents that I uncover in indexes, back cover copy, front cover titles and design, or pop song lyrics.
I would like to encourage serendipitous reading in two ways. First, when we read outside any canon, we may be making ourselves more interesting to other people, especially people not vested in our “expertise.” Second, when we read in parallel to the canon of vocational literature, such reading can inform and complement the already-familiar understandings of vocation.
My example of Reed-to-Schwartz also points to the value of reading biographies and biographical fiction as ways to supplement more theoretical knowledge by connecting it to stories of vocation in real life—something that I would suggest does not depend on the field. For readers who are makers, the staying power of Julian Barnes’ book about the Soviet-era Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich comes to mind. Alex Danchev’s biography of French painter Paul Cezanne is full of insight for visual artists. Just as Barnes’ book reminds readers that intellectual and creative vocations can be a matter of life and death, so, too, does Danchev explore the role of that rare artistic temperament in the calling of many late nineteenth and twentieth-century practitioners.
A more recent example of my serendipitous reading is Patricia Hampl’s Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime, published in 2006. I can’t remember precisely how I acquired my remaindered copy several years ago, but Hampl, a memoirist, was new to me. (My habit of serendipitous reading often involves curiosity for authors I am unfamiliar with.) I picked her book off the shelf for a few reasons: the way Ingres’ famous odalisque drapes across the cover, the words “blue” and “sublime” in the title, and the fact that Hampl is from my home state of Minnesota. But what sealed the purchase was the description on the back cover of how a Matisse painting in the Art Institute of Chicago mesmerized the young Hampl. I, too, was mesmerized by the same, relatively unremarkable painting as a young art student—Woman before an Aquarium!
I am rereading Blue Arabesque, slowly and deliciously. This particular memoir may, in fact, have circled back to me, serendipitously, because I can’t explain why I picked it up again as I was thinking about writing this post. In her review of Hampl’s writing, Colleen Mondor gets it right:
“She makes it clear she is one of us—one of those fans of art and literature or film and music who cannot leave their points of interest behind; who are compelled to ask questions, seek out shared experiences with their subjects and even, yes certainly, collect postcards as talismans. What a beautiful thing it would be if we all saw a painting of a woman and an aquarium and then took the time to wonder about it; to deeply and sincerely wonder.”
Wonder is not part of everybody’s vocational discernment, and many incoming first-year students seem to have little capacity for it. But wonder—and affection and ardor and longing—ought to be talked about in vocational conversations. Likewise, Hampl’s Blue Arabesque can inform vocational discernment in a number of ways. It includes her insight about an appropriate time and tempo, about the tension between feeling provincial and having greater ambitions, about the importance of traveling and coming home, and about the roles of reticence and privacy. In her chapter on Jerome Hill’s autobiographical film, Hampl claims that personal narrative can give a life shapeliness (her term), but not definition or truthfulness. She argues that while autobiographical narrative is important for constructing the contour of a life, the first-person attempt to capture a whole is subject to time’s “imperial transformations” and “memory’s botched bookkeeping.” Hampl’s caution might serve as a springboard to thinking clearly about the value and limitation of narrative to vocational discernment.
I know, I know, who has time for reading, much less serendipitous reading?! Given all the demands on what little time you have for reading related to scholarship, it’s obvious why most of your reading is intentional and connected to the canon of a field. But maybe summer is a good season for reading serendipitously. Be open to an impulse and let a non-canonical reading help you meander through the level land of your expertise.
Paul Burmeister is professor of art at Wisconsin Lutheran College, where he is also assistant dean of advising. He is a NetVUE Faculty Fellow, having been a member of the 2019 cohort of NetVUE’s Teaching Vocational Exploration seminar. For other posts by Paul, click here.
