Eve Tushnet shoots and scores:
In her college novel The Secret History, Donna Tartt describes a student who, having spent hours and days reading classical works in dead languages, looks up from his books with “fifth-century eyes.” He has become different, through his encounters with radically different worldviews. He has loved the classics precisely because of their startling, alien, unknown qualities, and for a fleeting and paradoxical moment he can attain his desire: to unite with that alien quality, without making it any less alien. This description of the process of education (Tartt declares in her epigraph that “our story is the education of our heroes.”) captures its dangers, as well as the erotic energy that propels education. Today, it is rarely recognized that Eros is the basis of education, because both Eros and education make it inconvenient to hold many of the beliefs that appeal most to intelligent, skeptical Americans.
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