still on daniel heins. one of the things he told me, when i saw him last thursday, was why he chose to become an academic. his reason, which was surprising, is different from what, at the distinguished majors party last friday, john milbank was also talking to nohrnberg about. milbank's view is the more old-fashioned though not unattractive view that academics are the most civilised people left, in a renaissance-humanist way, i guess. daniel's reason: because, he said, english professors are secular priests. i wondered if he meant, as milbank, that the humanities redeem the modern world from the etc of etc, and teachers of the humanities are the high guardians of knowledge and missionaries of cultural literacy. but what dan heins thinks is not at all this. literature is a way of reaching out to people. if you have a problem today you can only go to a counsellor or psychiatrist, and that's admitting you are a problem and need to be fixed. or else there is religion - but priests don't get much attention nowadays. so literature is the way. it does the same - teach you how to live - without that kind of pyschological taintedness. i think i was somewhat shocked by that. not that it isn't a well-meant sentiment - and yet literature as ethics, or therapy through literature, is something i can't abide. that it does have that effect: that you grow in it, that you read lives in it, that it becomes an order for your own life - that i don't deny. that you try to confront the unknowable through words, to come to yourself through language, all that is true and terribly important. and of course - we send people poems and quotes to explain, comfort, express. it does do that, and it is good that it does, but if it isn't - for its own sake - then i cannot accept this. i don't exactly mean art for art's sake, but the education of the heart should be different from pure joy in words - that to say that living is synonymous with literature mustn't mean that literature is instruction. the words first, instruction second. obviously i'm reducing his point of view rather, but there is something terribly sacrilegious to me - about wanting to teach literature in order to help people sort their lives out. that you would want to pursue literature not for its own sake. i am horribly disturbed.