Matthew C Dean

The first episode of The Good Lives from the @SnowInstitute is now live. It features Borden Flanagan of American University, my first teacher (@Blahbliptyblah) The Good Lives is an intimate and confessional interview series with people who have spent their lives reading Great Books. Borden helped me to see that this project has legs. His interview was amazing to shoot. It covers his early encounter with close reading (through a Jehovah's Witness, of course), encountering nature and death in the mountains of Washington as a teenager, discovering the possibility of articulating the world through reading Genesis, working through the dilemmas of reason through ancient political philosophy, and much more. It's fascinating and a real delight. I hope you'll watch and share it. This series is for everyone, but most emphatically for young people who in our times are less and less aware of what role good reading can play in forming, or opening the possibility for, an interesting and worthwhile life. For the rest of us who already engage in the same kind of activity Borden does it is interesting and, in Borden's case, tremendously amusing to hear him speak about his own life; for a high school or college kid, it could be the difference between being aware that there is a world wider and a life richer than they could imagine out there and being stuck. As Borden puts it: “What the good life means is, by way of these books, of conversations and thoughts, you increase your contact with the phenomena of life, which are inherently problematic and filled with paradox. But that's being alive, and that's joyful, and that's better than survival.” In this connection I'll say that we've shot many interviews so far with great people and look forward to bringing them to you soon, but I'll note one theme that keeps coming back in each one. The reading of these books and leading of a life tutored by them often depends on an accident: having a teacher see something in you, a friend hand you a copy of a book which you wouldn't have picked up for yourself, witnessing for the first time an excellent human being who was shaped by reading or being horrified for the first time by seeing anew lives disconnected from learning and thinking: "I won't let this happen to me". If one of these videos can make its way to one kid for whom it can be an accident of this kind, the project will have been a success. So I ask again: please do share the interviews, send them to your kids, your friends with kids, your friends who teach, and whoever might help these lifelines reach the people who need them. We're honored by your viewership and trust you'll enjoy watching. Thank you - NA youtube.com/watch?v=-CcNqvm4…

Come, students.