Unlike the intellectually drab environment of the mediocre school at 's Hertogenbosch, the monastery at Steyn included at least some members who shared his interest in classical literature and encouraged his intellectual longings.
But many of them speak with pure clarity about the reasons they were drawn to school again: idle curiosity, intellectual interest, a longing to be part of the big conversations of the day, and a desire for self-respect.
The story is Smith at her best, sparkling and zany, fiercely intellectual yet full of humble longing.
"The common human qualities of vanity and greed for power" are particularly dangerous among intellectuals, he observed, and their longing to identify with political causes often results in "an almost unbelievable loss of critical reasoning".
"Unlike almost any other classical performer of recent times, Leonard Bernstein adamantly, and sometimes controversially, refused to compartmentalize and separate his emotional, intellectual, political, erotic and spiritual longings from the musical experience," Jonathan Cott writes in "Dinner With Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein" (Oxford University Press, $24.95).
Longing for retribution is longing for retribution.
It ruminates on the cruel tumult of Sidney's romantic life, but also on his longing, never-fulfilled, for an intellectual soul mate.
Mary Ann, by contrast, followed Maggie into a self-punishing adolescence marked by an intense longing for the kind of intellectual and artistic life not generally available to girls in the muddy backwaters of late-Hanoverian England.
Alma is portrayed as a true, enlightenment-age woman but as her intellectual knowledge increases, so too does her emotional longing.
