It is incredible how far away from reality the person who locks himself up in a university and devotes himself one hundred percent to academic research is. If he is an intellectual, he disbands his faculty, using it in a private world alien to reality. For the rest, he does not even complain, because he exercises a profession: it is as if he accepts the price. And in this he loses the flame that encourages study because sees in it the hope of solutions to problems of real importance. The intellectual needs to regularly suffer reality shocks, so that he can insert reality into what he thinks; otherwise he loses himself in futility and his thinking becomes useless. Cioran, for example, was more philosophical every time he burst out buying vegetables in the market and let the consequences take the form of French prose. In short: the problem has never been to isolate oneself from the world, but rather to completely abandon its forcefulness by letting oneself be inundated with the sterility of abstractions.
It Is Incredible How Far Away From Reality…
