The joys of aimless learning

 
As January draws to a close, I'm looking back on three-four weeks of very intense end-of-term work. In the Swedish university system - in which I am employed until the end of the month - the autumn term ends in the second week of January, while the spring term begins in the third week. Consequently, January is a month in which everything intensifies, because the grades of the latest exams need to be out of the way quicker than usual, and dissertations that I have supervised throughout the autumn are now being evaluated and graded, with all the extra admin and preparation work that this entails.

As January draws to a close, I'm looking back on the modules I have taught or to which I have contributed, I'm looking back on the dissertations I have supervised or evaluated, and I'm looking back on all the things I have learned as part of my preparation for my modules. I have learned a lot this term, also about myself, and almost everything I have learned has been for a specific purpose, be it a lecture, a conference, or for administrative reasons. On the one hand, this is of course a great boon - I know more going out of the term than I did going into it, and this is a good progress. 

However, when learning is as intense as it is in the Swedish system - each module runs for only five weeks, so the preparation time is mercilessly short - there comes a point when this learning starts to feel forced, like finishing a meal out of ingrained courtesy even though you are on the verge of sending it all back again. At this point, reading becomes a chore, and this in turn creates a strange emptiness to someone whose favourite pastime is reading. Since the second half of December, I have only finished reading one single book, and while I have started reading others, I have been unable to finish them, mostly because I have had very little mental energy left for these books, but also because these books are medieval texts and therefore pertain to my professional life. In this way, reading these texts bears some resemblance to the kind of chore work that I have been doing for large parts of the term. It is a mood that I have struggled to get out of. Fortunately, it seems that the tide is slowly turning. 

This week, as a greater part of the items on my physical to-do-list have been crossed off and I have slowly sunk into a state of what is either relaxation or carelessness, I have found a way to resume learning but without a specific aim for the learning in question. Before my return to Norway, I had ordered a booklet from the project Ancient European Languages And Writings (AELAW), hosted by the University of Zaragoza. These booklets provide introductions to now-extinct languages that survive in small corpora of inscriptions, and that - at least for the most part - are not yet understood in full. This is a subject that I find fascinating, but which I will never be able to employ in my own research, as this is well beyond my topic, and well beyond the period of my expertise. Moreover, since I am not teaching ancient history again anytime soon, this is not something that I am reading with the aim of incorporating it into a syllabus. I have therefore started learning again.       

Booklet 1 in the Ancient European Languages And Writings (AELAW) series
Published by the University of Zaragoza

This weekend, I'm drawn into the fascinating fragmentary world of the Celtiberian language, one of the several languages used in Iberia in the centuries before the birth of Christ, and one which survives in a range of fascinating sources. The booklet on Celtiberian has opened up a window into a world of tantalising little windows into a past not unknown but not as well known as it could have been, had we only possessed greater knowledge of its languages. It is the kind of reading that stokes the imagination, and that helps to give an even greater depth to the knowledge I have already accumulated about the period in question. It is the kind of learning that does not help my own professional life, but which gives my reading life so much more weight and pleasure, and that allows me to disentangle myself from the various chores and tasks presided over by looming deadlines and concerns about future employment. It is a learning that is aimless because it does not serve an immediate purpose, and it is exactly that characteristic that means that this is a joyful and pleasant learning, which might be aimless but in no way pointless.