Think back to the first time you fell in love. It seemed silly just because you were too young to understand it. Whatever the reaction was, realize that at that moment, it was true. They might not last, but in retrospect, they were not superfluous or worthless.
To think that temporary things carry no value is to think like a jealous new lover, who cannot bear the fact that their beloved had once loved someone else so entirely, that they want to erase the past altogether. Nevertheless, the past is still there and alive. It will slip out during a drunken night or in the company of an understanding friend. What we have to realize is that scholars too, are still humans, and humans are victims of all kinds of vanities and flaws.
Hence, we’re faced with a tricky problem when we want to find out the origins of our love story with scholarship. Theories and concepts when they’re laid out in axioms and beautiful arguments look like they’re so far from petty concerns, that sometimes we find it hard to admit to ourselves that the original motivation for pursuing ideas might’ve stemmed from a place that’s a little sinister.
Maybe it wasn’t the desire for truth that nudged the young man onto the path of studying philosophy, or maybe it wasn’t the love of beauty that inspired the undergraduate to pursue her dream of studying art history. It might as well be the case that the philosophy student sought a kind of control and comfort in philosophy because, at some point, the chaos of the world was a little too painful to bear. Maybe the young girl was humiliated and displaced when she was in high school, and now she must find a way to distinguish herself from what she studies. The origin story is not usually clean and noble, and it’s much better to admit that than to hide it from ourselves.
Just like our first episode of love. Despite the fact that we were young and didn’t know any better, we still arrived here now in one piece, alive and better off. Those brief episodes of passion weren’t useless or unjustified, but they’re merely rites of passage to truly teach us the value of a more mature kind of love.
The same goes for being a scholar. Whatever got us into it in the first place could seem quite silly in retrospect, yet when the rubber meets the road, the path of learning would humble the student, and purge most of the silly ideas from their mind. Hence, there’s no point in denying the original inkling and calling it silly. We still decided to show up to class at the end of the day. From that end, all is true. Noble or crass, superficial or profound. The point of entry cares not about where you were before you embarked upon this journey, it only cares that you stay on it and absorb all the pending lessons.