Lamenting many similar flights of the intellectuals in the long twentieth century — their noisy ideological identifications and terrible political choices — the late Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski once pointed out that, however much intellectuals yearn to be both "prophets and heralds of reason," those roles cannot be reconciled.
He was a high European intellectual who yearned for a Tolstoyan holiness and simplicity of life, a philosophical giant with scant respect for philosophy.
Relationships form a part of her characters' arcs, but it's their intellectual desires, their yearning to transform themselves and their world, that Gunderson foregrounds.
However, its subject matter, which was presented to its readers as the memoirs of a deceased European intellectual who fanatically yearned after a 12 year old girl, proved too obscene for several authorities and was banned in its first decade of publication in France, England, Argentina, New Zealand, and South Africa as well as in some American communities.
But even here I can discern a funhouse-mirror Wallace logic, a perverse sort of yearning for intellectual honesty and consistency.
Recognizing a yearning for "intellectual community," the National Endowment for the Humanities has given $2.2 million in grants since 2009 to fund college and university courses that tackle the "enduring questions".
If, however, he really does yearn for more intellectual and educational challenge, congratulations.
Robinson was, she told herself, only interested in money, while she yearned for the intellectual stimulation that could be found at the home the Lanes shared with Mrs. Lane's mother, Lady Drysdale, among their circle of literary and scientific friends.
Ms. Limerick lives in Boulder, Colorado, which is the kind of large town or small city that often appears on those best-places lists, and she likes it, even as she admits to some "yearning for intense, Northeastern intellectual life".
Cameron might have been able to capture something of Eliot's great seriousness, intelligence, and generosity — her expression "not only of habitual brooding thought and intellectual travail but of intense and yearning human sympathy and tenderness," as one observer put it.
