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Composed: A timeless way of living. A podcast for women exploring living patterns of virtue, craft, community, and delight, that carry enduring wisdom into modern life.
This is Christine Perrin, host of Composed, A Timeless Way of Living, a podcast of the Humanitas Institute that explores living patterns of virtue, craft, community, and delight, and draws the classical tradition into contemporary times. Timothy Patitsas, welcome to Composed.
Timothy Patitsas:Hi, Christine. It's so good to be here.
Christine Perrin:So good to have you. Thank you. I'm gonna just say a few things about you that are formal. You've been the assistant professor of ethics at Holy Cross since the 2005. You are the director of the MTS program.
Christine Perrin:You teach in the theology program to both graduates and undergraduates. I know you do a pilgrimage as well every year or often to Greece and Constantinople. And you wrote this book, which recently I was speaking on this podcast to someone at the University of Chicago, and she and I had the same stack of books next to us without preparing, and the first one on the stack was this one. So that was pretty exciting. I knew that when we had that and Rowan Williams' book on Dostoevsky, that we were meant to be talking to each other.
Christine Perrin:But tell us will you tell us a little bit about yourself that that formal introduction doesn't capture? How did you find yourself where you are now just on the basis of your beginnings?
Timothy Patitsas:Yeah. That's that's interesting, and I feel like there's a kind of constant reinvention of one's well, I I guess, you know, as a professor, you know, your worldview is kind of your identity in in a way. Maybe it shouldn't be that way, but and as as you teach each semester and and revise your notes or teach new courses sometimes a little bit outside your field, you know, you're going through that process of rediscovery and not really reinvention of the self, but certainly a revision. You know? It's like repentance through lecture note revision.
Christine Perrin:I love that. And syllabus revision.
Timothy Patitsas:And yeah. Yeah.
Christine Perrin:What did I learn that needs to about my method or what I did last time that needs to change this time?
Timothy Patitsas:Yeah. Method questions, and sometimes it's things that, you know, you thought you knew for sure that get changed a little bit. Certainly, I think maybe I did, without really realizing it, want this life. I think because books were so central or authors were so central and so were magazines. Like, if there was something this whole horse whisperer thing, you know, started as a an an article in Time magazine in, like, I wanna say 1989 or 1990, and I saw it, and I was so so enamored of that.
Timothy Patitsas:And so, you know, pursuing ideas and then, you know, having kind of that English sense that, you know, that the professor could be this person of wisdom and you know, was uniquely, you know, situated to to be that by by the opportunity they had to engage with books and engage with the canon of great books and things like that. Maybe, you know, early on, I think, on some very mythic, like an immature mythic sense, like that's what I want it to be, and didn't really think of it as something that was doable. And then it just kind of I don't know that it happened.
Christine Perrin:It did happen as a as a matter of fact.
Timothy Patitsas:I am wearing a sport coat with a turtleneck and a beard.
Christine Perrin:That's It
Timothy Patitsas:happened.
Christine Perrin:You got that part down. Did you do you have a memory of a person even, you know, middle school or high school or earlier, whenever it was, that felt like an exemplar of this mode of life?
Timothy Patitsas:I mean, I I think all my public school teachers in elementary school, I mean, just I loved my teachers and I loved that they were constantly taking us by the hand and showing us new worlds and the bulletin boards, you know, and they would redo them each month or something like that. And, you know, everything was so evocative in a way. It was like, you know, it wasn't just everything was, you know, fall. You know, fall is you know, autumn is somehow these leaves and, you know, this practice, and you you always were being not only taught, but somehow suggesting some imaginative world. So yeah.
Christine Perrin:Wow. Already, you're taking us into this territory that I hoped we would make our way to about Pattern because you just said fall was x y z, and school was these books and these bulletin boards, and and you're already speaking that language not just of this person made this impression, although I know that you believe that personhood is a huge part of how the world gets patterned. But but also of the kind of elements that Christopher Alexander says helps us take a beauty first approach to the world. Of these good patterns in our life that we somehow recognize and then internalize and deploy, I guess you could say. But I I would really love to hear you talk more about that either in this concrete way of just remembering some of those patterns that were forceful and alive in your life, and what Christopher Alexander says about that.
Christine Perrin:Or you could start on the abstract end, whichever way.
Timothy Patitsas:No. No. I I like the the concrete thing. I I think in terms of that evocative early world, you know, I I would just like to add a couple things that you know, we we had a paper route. You know, putting on a heavy pack and going door to door on on the same route, that kind of you know, that pattern, maybe this is pattern, and just the slight gradations of change in the weather every day.
Timothy Patitsas:Like, that was so impactful to me. Like, okay. What are the leaves doing? What's what does the ground look like? What's mushy?
Timothy Patitsas:What's, you know there just was a lot of time to think. I don't know how long it took me to deliver the papers, an hour, thirty minutes, whatever it was, but it was just a lot of time to daydream. And in school, we would study, you know, the colonial era and the age of exploration, and that all just seemed to me to be alive. And, like, I was part of it through these daily walks somehow.
Christine Perrin:I love that. Yeah. I love, I mean, I love the fact that you had to go outside into the world, and you had to do something that was routine. But that the routine somehow became invested with exploration. Also, we've spoken about the fact that, you know, you don't go outside to see the stars, and so you don't have a relationship to them anymore.
Christine Perrin:But the fact that you didn't need a farm to be in touch with the weather and the sky, all you needed was a paper route. But it did that effectually.
Timothy Patitsas:Yeah. And it was there was some elements of danger in terms of dogs on the paper route. There's, you know, there's I
Christine Perrin:love that.
Timothy Patitsas:You know, sometimes, you know, on certain days of the week, the papers were much thicker. I don't know. I was delivering the Akron Beacon Journal in Kent, Ohio, but, you know, Wednesdays or something, there were extra inserts. And so it was quite a thing, you know, as a little child to put that thing on your back. And and, of course, there was no negotiating it.
Timothy Patitsas:You know, the the route had to be delivered. So of course, it was a very safe town. I mean, there was, you know, I think, you know, maybe once or twice in all the years delivering paper that there was ever any element of what seemed like, you know, danger from people. So that that was, you know, a a life giving pattern. Then, And of course, the people along the route were either absent or nice.
Timothy Patitsas:I loved just those glimpse glimpses into people's homes. You know, you just see through, you know, that living room, this living room. You know, houses smell different. You know? Because in those days, we had to also do the collecting.
Timothy Patitsas:We had to collect their their subscriptions. So, know, they open the door and you get that what are they cooking? You know? Like, you just I don't know. I sound like a dog, but there was just some kind of, like I was thinking it was sensory.
Timothy Patitsas:It was it was just a beautiful routine pattern of exposure to the world and to people in it. You know, the people who would tease you or whatever. Just because it it's a kind of an experience of community. I mean, than, let's say, just staying at home and watching television or playing video games.
Christine Perrin:Very much so.
Timothy Patitsas:You are having that.
Christine Perrin:I have always actually loved that walking in the evening when the lights are coming on inside and and looking into these snow globes of other people's lives.
Timothy Patitsas:Yes.
Christine Perrin:And Yeah. That's great. From my earliest days, I have loved that. I still love it. And it's not that I wanna pry.
Christine Perrin:It's just remarkable to see that intimacy, I guess, that order of and like you say, the otherness of it too, the familiarity and the difference from what you've known.
Timothy Patitsas:And that that the dignity of the that each person somehow precious to God or each family is precious to God and has their own internal logic, you know, which you just glimpse and you move on. You glimpse and you move on. You know? It's just that was just an early pattern.
Christine Perrin:And when did you start doing that? How long did you do that?
Timothy Patitsas:I I think when I was in kindergarten for the first time, I had four older brothers and one older sister, and and they, you know, they I was the youngest, and they said to me, okay. You know, we'll pay you 25¢. You gotta live deliver the paper across the street, you know, just carry it.
Christine Perrin:Great.
Timothy Patitsas:And then, you know, by second grade and third grade, then you start having more of a you know, still still the older brothers and sisters were managing the empire, but, you know, you would be the one.
Christine Perrin:So we were talking about this in relationship to the patterns that you experienced at school
Timothy Patitsas:Yes.
Christine Perrin:And also in relationship to Christopher Alexander's ideas about patterns. Can you say a little bit about what led you to even be able to have this conversation that we're having right now about living patterns and dead patterns?
Timothy Patitsas:It really was. I was still doing the PhD, but I mean, I was done with high school, college, seminary, and then I was a friend during my PhD years loaned me their copy of The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander. And everybody wants to write something mystical, but, you know, he really did. And it's a perfectly mystical little book, and yet it's also completely ordinary and sort of mundane in a way. Right?
Christine Perrin:I'm attached to the material world as well.
Timothy Patitsas:And you open it, and you're just not the same after after one reading of it. You're just not the same and and in in the best way. Right? Because I think there's a whole another genre of books and then especially films in our day where you're not the same because they've really shown you something shocking and unanticipated and just heartbreaking. Although you don't have that you don't necessarily know to call it heartbreaking it is.
Timothy Patitsas:And in his his book, you know, it's it's you're never the same because you're just you're more whole afterwards. And, you know, as far as your question, how does that relate to these these patterns? You know, one of the things that he says in that book is that, you know, what determines the character of a place are the events that keep happening there. The the the pattern of events give a place its, you know, its shape. I think I had read I had read Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities first, and so I I was familiar with this concept of the ballet of the city street.
Timothy Patitsas:But Jane Jacobs is you know, she's got other fish to fry, and he really is Christopher Alexander is looking for an experience that I would call mystical, like, in the ordinary every day of how beauty and form can arise in a place and get to a level that is so I think one of his phrases is a self maintaining fire. And it's that that glow that happens when the the quality without a name is present in a place.
Christine Perrin:Could you say something about the quality without a name and even about this idea that beauty has an objectivity to it? It's not just subjective. It's not just in the eye of the beholder.
Timothy Patitsas:He challenges, you know, your your kind of normal way of thinking about the world. He says, you know, there's a quality that you recognize, but you can't really define it. And then he proceeds to describe it in principally in architecture and art, and he gives you examples. And he he says that this quality is a quality of the fullness of life, and it can't be named because it's too precise for language. He tells you that the purpose or the search of your life is to search for this quality, to become it, to to appreciate it, to, well, mostly to seek it out, you know, when it when it comes, you know, it kinda gives you pause.
Timothy Patitsas:But it's some kind of, like, a fullness of of life with a a sort of poignancy. He says there's something sad about the quality without a name. I think just through the photographs he chooses in the book, you you sort of come to the conclusion that, yeah, he's right. I I do know what that quality is, and it is the most important thing, and I have seen it. And it does form a kind of, you know, guiding something, you know, and it is very personal because the sadness could be, you know, the aged lines in your grandmother's face.
Timothy Patitsas:You know, it's it's it's something that speaks of of cost and of impermanency. So it's bound up with the passage of time.
Christine Perrin:I think you mentioned in your book in this chapter, which we should just say that Tim writes a 100 pages on this in The Ethics of Beauty. And that's a very nice introduction to Christopher Alexander. Also a surprising one because you take it in so many directions. You see it as a principle that underlies many domains. And that's always very interesting to me when you come upon something that's true here and here and here, even though they're very different from each other.
Christine Perrin:But one thing you say about the Quality Without a Name is that it builds cities and homes in which human beings feel deeply at home and at ease Mhmm. And completely alive. And I love that combination. I actually love just asking people that in this place, you know, in this space of or having them stumble on it. But at home, at ease, and completely alive, those three things lining up are one of the indicators that you say, you know you've stumbled on the quality without a name when that's what is elicited.
Christine Perrin:You also say, I mean, you just said the quality without a name, very hard to define, is time bound, and therefore has sadness because it ends or it's threatened. But I think you also say that it's ineffable, that there's a kind of yearning towards it that we taste and then go in search of. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that, and then also about some of those concrete patterns that Alexander outlines for us, like a room that has two windows or windows on all sides or things like that. So people realize we're not just talking about woo woo. He is mystical, but he is also talking about something that's grounded in the built environment, in the material environment, but that has an impact on us emotionally and spiritually.
Timothy Patitsas:Yeah. I I think if, you know, you mentioned the woo woo thing. I I think if if a person reading him does not believe that we have a soul, you know, that they're so materialistic that they think it's all just epiphenomenon of some materialistic factors. That at the minimum, what what you would say is that, you know, these billions of years of the development of life, we know on many levels where we're at home, where we're safe, where we belong, where our powers are welcomed. So one of his patterns, you know, that we might try to fulfill is that people are somehow more at peace if they're in the corner, the corner office, not because it's prestigious, but because they have windows on at least two sides.
Timothy Patitsas:Somehow, when we only have light on one side, it's like living in a cave, and we're trapped in there. But when we have light on at least two sides and and you see this in look, when I worked at the Harvard Byzantine Library in in Washington DC, Dumbarton Oaks, that, you know, they would design these old homes so, you you know, you have the corners, and then in the center, they would pop on both sides. So you create that possibility of light on two sides everywhere, and that's a that's a very common, you know, pattern of building. And you do feel more at peace and, you know, sort of more deeply, you know, within yourself. And he takes this to, you know, even it's even in relationships.
Timothy Patitsas:Like, if there's a if there's living patterns in a relationship, you'll feel more deeply, you know, rooted in yourself. You're not always fighting against your own, you know, kind of innate characteristics as an organism. But of course, if you're a religious person, you add to this or if you, you know, through literature or art, you have this awareness of something more transcendent in yourself, then you see that in these places, some higher dimension of thought and feeling is possible or is met. But I I like what you said, you know, that ineffable doesn't just mean wordless, but it means inspiring yearning. I I've told this this before, and I I hate to tell it too many times, but, you know, when I was in the second grade and we read, you know, The Life of Squanto, I I remember reading that on my bed in my room as the sun was going down in in late fall.
Timothy Patitsas:And when he gets back to Massachusetts, he's you know, he was kidnapped and sort of taken to Spain and then England, and that's why he spoke English when the pilgrims got here. And he gets back and everyone's gone from his people, you know, that that poignancy of loss. You don't feel that his people didn't matter because they were wiped out. They were lost in these epidemic diseases. You feel that they live forever, but that they're just out of reach, but that you don't, you know, but that you reach for them nevertheless.
Christine Perrin:They're almost like Aeneas going for to hug Carissa three times and trying to embrace her, and and she's a ghost, and he doesn't know it until he does that. That's such a sad moment in that book, The Aeneid. As you're talking, I'm thinking also about for me, sometimes I've said this, but about when you talk about needing to know you have a soul, and there's the material things, and then there are these transcendent things that we feel perhaps if we believe in the soul, a gateway or a relationship between the two. As a poet who thinks a lot about metaphor and about the mind's gesture, that continual gesture, why are we always comparing the material to the immaterial? We just do it, you know, we can't not do it.
Christine Perrin:It doesn't matter how sophisticated or unsophisticated you are. It doesn't matter if it's science or literature. And I've always felt like that almost is my basis for believing that there's there's a soul. It's very simple. It's not even a big argument.
Christine Perrin:You know?
Timothy Patitsas:Yeah. It's it's so interesting. You know, like, say, what is the meaning of life? You know, what is the meaning of anything? It's always something that's present in the story, in the event, but that points beyond.
Timothy Patitsas:I mean, that's the definition of meaning of. So if there's a meaning of life, then something about life points beyond it. And, I mean, if you look at, say, you know, Native American religion or or just my own spiritual father who's a Russian Orthodox priest in in Moscow, you know, after his grandma died, he had such a vivid he was not yet a believer. He was a teenager. He had such a vivid sense that the line between this world and the next is much thinner than we realize.
Timothy Patitsas:But sometimes we do become aware of that thinness and that the beloved dead are just over there. After my mother died and I started to, you know, contemplate my various infractions as her son, he said, you know, the relationship can still develop. Just because she's dead doesn't mean that the relationship doesn't still develop. It isn't just, you know, saying sorry to a wall. And I I felt that subsequently.
Timothy Patitsas:I experienced that for myself. It's true.
Christine Perrin:Thank you. Very meaningful to me, being sick and thinking about the relationships that I have that will continue.
Timothy Patitsas:They will. And especially if people have in their in their heart, you know, that it can and are open to it.
Christine Perrin:As you were talking, I was thinking about a friend of mine who started a series of schools called the Ecclesial Schools in Florida. And one of his goals in starting this network of schools was for kids to feel that they belonged in the world, that the world was a good home for them.
Timothy Patitsas:Oh, love it.
Christine Perrin:Yes. I I would love to hear your response because I hear you saying so much of that. And and I think I hear you saying, this is one of Christopher Alexander's chief ideas in this idea of the quality without a name.
Timothy Patitsas:When we think of vanity, we often think of it in terms of like, oh, I'm so proud of my appearance. But there's a different kind of vanity that I think is more elemental and more painful, and that is just an inability to forget ourself in the joy and immediacy of situations, you know, within those, to just to just forget ourself and embrace. And that kind of vanished constant self regard and self criticism, and, you know, it it saps the life right out of you. And it's so hard to learn and so hard to experiment in that kind of a context. And education has tried different things, and I think Montessori, you know, seems to really I don't know much about it, but seems to do so well with, you know, getting kids at home with their learning.
Timothy Patitsas:Or I think gender segregated schools were part of that. Like, the girls don't feel they have to be performing in front of that criticism and vice versa. And but I'm not saying just whatever it takes to forget the self, maybe it's, you know, we should be teaching kids, you know, formalized dancing, you know, ballroom dancing from first grade or anything. We did this beautiful it's so beautiful revision of our core curriculum in Hellenic College, you know, when I right after I became dean. So my impact on it was not that great.
Timothy Patitsas:It was, you know, it was it was percolating. And my only regret is I kind of wish we had had a mandatory acting class because we we did hire an adjunct to teach an acting class as an elective, and when I sat in on those for as the dean for course reviews, I could see, my god, it's such a course in how to get into the mind of another person and how to take up the experience of another person and also how to forget yourself in this performance. And I thought, gosh, that that should be required. There's many ways to skin that cat.
Christine Perrin:I thought you were gonna say dancing or blind dancing or or that communal dancing piece
Timothy Patitsas:Yeah.
Christine Perrin:As a way of being with other people. I love that.
Timothy Patitsas:I think even just the, you know, the martial arts can do some of that, you know, just kind of sometimes, I don't know if this is true for women, sometimes for men, only getting hit can help you overcome self consciousness. I mean, I don't mean hit like, you know, you're bleeding, but I mean, just physical contact. And it's like, okay. I'm I'm in the moment, and I I feel the brotherhood with my teammate and even my opponent.
Christine Perrin:I really love this emphasis on self remembrance and self forgetfulness, and the way that the ego is a kind of harm to us when it can't be forgotten or left or or we can't be released from it. I love your bringing that into the conversation. And I think my understanding of the way that patterns help us do that is, and you're naming some really extreme patterns that are bringing they force you into the moment at a time in your life when you're very self conscious. But it also seems that, you know, in a day when you have to structure it yourself, you have to think so much about all the big things. What's what matters?
Christine Perrin:What you know? Whereas if you have these patterns that are established, as you say, in relationships or in your home or in your work, or even just in your day. What should a day have? It releases you from always thinking about the meaning, the purpose, and it does help you to feel more at home. I can remember when I was a young mother, and I remember thinking, oh, I have these lists of things I have to get done, and none of the lists have the things that I love the most, such as walking outside and reading books.
Christine Perrin:So from now on, I'm putting those on the list. They're first. Because if I'm always looking at what has to get done, I'm never doing the things that are where the quality without a name exists.
Timothy Patitsas:And we we see this an analogous thing is in the life of professors that the more government money gets shoveled, I mean, shoveled is, you know, the word into higher education, the more governments are like, well, what are we getting for this? And who's working hard? And higher ed, which is supposed to be completely outside of the realm of just misery and stress and productivity, you know, we've we have factory farming. Now we're going for a factory college, and a professor should do five courses a semester or four or seven or and write this many papers per you know, and it's it's completely inimical to the kind of work that we want them to create for for society. And, you know, the way in which mothers, especially mothers with young children, professors, writers, artists, scientists, those are all species of of priesthood, and the priest is not efficient in that sense.
Timothy Patitsas:And and a concern with efficiency destroys the priestly quality of those things. And then once you you take those vocations, which which are the north star of civilization, and you drag them out of that out of that firmament, then the society is rudderless. It or has rudders, but no nothing to steer by, and that's kind of what we're hoping for. That's what, you know, this mania for efficiency is leading to.
Christine Perrin:That language that you just used of the firmament and the guiding stars made me think of this line in your book that I really found so compelling that I want other mothers to hear, which is that women play out the primordial ecstasy of creation in giving birth, in in carrying a child, in giving birth. That it just strikes me that myth and epics and scriptural patterns of typology have been a huge part of your own education. For you to say things like that, for that to be the way that you're thinking about motherhood, what if someone had said that to me when I was gonna become a mother at age 22? It would have changed my experience, and I'm interested in the role that you think stories and archetypes play in forming our imagination in order to be able to understand what a beauty first approach to life is, or even just what life is. What are we doing?
Christine Perrin:What's the role of those kinds of stories and typologies even even if reading scripture typologically?
Timothy Patitsas:I think stories are an essential catalyst for this kind of proper cosmic imagination. Like, you you you really you really need it to make it your own, to make that imagination your own. But I think if you don't also have costly, and I'll define costly maybe, costly religious ritual carrying you know, setting the table, then would would put too much burden on on stories on the Marvel comic movies or I've don't don't know any of them, but I mean people who watch that or even the Lord of the Rings. It's like too much burden on that because those rich imaginative stories make you realize that that this costly liturgy is happening in your life and that it's kind of fun in a way. I mean, it's adventurous, fun in that sense, and that you are an essential part of it.
Timothy Patitsas:And I I think I think so so to me, what stories do is take costly religious ritual, which sort of was the is the is the the baseline, the drumbeat, and puts it at that flame in your heart at a personal level. Like, I'm in love with that character, and I don't know how, but that's who I wanna be. Or I don't know how, but that's the path I'm taking. Or somehow, I'm in love with that character, and, you know, I will be faithful to to him or her. Even though its story might seem more general, I think it doesn't really function that way.
Timothy Patitsas:I think it functions I think the the costly religious ritual because you grow up in it or you you immerse in it and you you don't wanna be late for it, it kind of hits our common nature. And then how do you come to this personal the secret the secret that is you? Like you said, the snow globe.
Christine Perrin:Oh, the secret that is you, and how do you come to it? Let me unpick that according to some of the language that I've heard you use in the book. You talk about it sounds like you're saying that stories reveal their revelations of a sort. But their revelations when they're true stories at the level of archetype or typological reality, when they're true or mythical, they reveal something that then ask something back from us. In other words, I have a friend, I'll just give an example, who the only book really in his home other than the Bible was The Lord of the Rings.
Christine Perrin:And as he was growing up, he read it and reread it. He played it. That book gave him these characters, you know, that he said to himself when he was in the midst of being in middle school and high school, those characters wouldn't do this thing that my peer group is asking me to do, and I want to be like them, so I can't do this. And that was a kind of requirement laid upon him because of that revelation. And I think that you call it theophany.
Christine Perrin:You know, we have these theophanies. We have these God revelations, but we could just call them revelations as well, that then want us to respond to them in order to be able to make progress with them. And I think you might even call that the twofold anointing or something like that, you know, that that there are these bright things that that are revealed to us that then walk alongside us in the in the darkness or in the requirement. Are you getting at some of that in what you just said?
Timothy Patitsas:You know, what I love about that story about your friend is that the commands, the the moral piece was was so completely inseparable from the revelation of the beauty of those characters. Like, there's so it's not like a a kind of painful moralism in the abstract. Or
Christine Perrin:Not at all. It was beauty.
Timothy Patitsas:The Eros is so great for that those characters that you you would willingly, you know, join yourself to their their those actions that are prescribed, you know, just before you even realize it, you know, you've, you know, you're halfway in. I think, you know, great great sermons can be like that. Like, you know, before you know it, you've already emptied your wallet into
Christine Perrin:I love your language of joining. You would join them. I love that language. It's a kind of and also the language of eras, which we should probably define, but this self forgetful longing that causes you to want to be harmonious with something beautiful, that then we all know that to be harmonious with anything, we have to give up something. We can't be harmonious with everything, which is why I don't like I love Walt Whitman, but I used to get very frustrated reading him like, can't you say no to anything?
Christine Perrin:But there's a kind of harmony that asks for a disharmony with something else. Yes. Your language of joining.
Timothy Patitsas:It's a quest. You know, you're joining them on a quest and you're leaving something else behind.
Christine Perrin:Can you say more about what eros is? How you use it in the book and how you just used it just now? What does that mean? People may not have ever heard of that language.
Timothy Patitsas:Eros was defined for me by Alan Bloom in his book, The Closing of the American Mind, which was the rage in 1987 or when when I was a senior in college. And and he he just defined it as love's mad self forgetting. It's those it's those moments of and when you're so in love with something that you would willingly leave yourself or your situation behind to embrace it. And that can be something ordinary like music or it can be the person that you're in love with. I think that, you know, in some other era when the work that adults did was not so hidden from children and because it might be right in their village or right in their town and they might be apprenticing to it at a young age, that I think people could have that eros for you know, like like, I might see a young girl just with so much admiration for her mother.
Timothy Patitsas:Like, that's a it's a kind of eros. Like, she wants nothing more than to be like her mom. Or I think for maybe for boy, it might be like just some uncle or some figure in the community, some older man that has mastered a particular skill or something. So that is a kind of eros as well. Like, it's a love that's filled with awe and in which you don't know it, but it is already it has decentered you.
Timothy Patitsas:Like, you are no longer fully your own. You've you've seen something else, and that's where you're headed. And I don't know if that's
Christine Perrin:It's very helpful, incredibly helpful, and related to what we were just talking about in the sense that I read also in this chapter that I was rereading of yours about the mystical architect that sometimes it's not our powering through our strong virtue or morality that helps us or our self discipline that helps us do the right thing. Sometimes it's this personhood filled with eros for something that we've glimpsed that and this goes back to what you said about our secret self that we have to not violate in order to stay the self that we are. And that is so beautiful and so rare to even hear people talk about it in those terms. But is that part of what you're getting at when you say that secret self or that whole self?
Timothy Patitsas:You know, we don't we don't know where sort of where we're going. Right? When we're little kids, we just we're somewhere, and there seem to be many clues. I mean, in terms of at any rate, there seem to be an array of possible careers, possible places that we might live or something. But early on, certain of them just resonate with us, and and there's some that quality without a name, I think, becomes we start to taste it, and, like, a thing for me seems like life.
Christine Perrin:You're taking us back to Christopher Alexander, and and a little bit earlier, you mentioned there were other things about him that I like to talk about, but you mentioned the ballet of the city street. And I think that's another way of identifying what does it mean to live beauty first. What are some of the practical steps that you take in order to open yourself up to that path or start on that path? And I like your word of clues. It seems like one of the clues that Jane Jacobs is telling us is look where something is thriving before you try to rebuild or Yeah.
Christine Perrin:Look at could you explore that? Because I think that's where she and Alexander really come together in different aspects. Hers is more sociological communal.
Timothy Patitsas:You
Christine Perrin:know, his is much more concrete architectural in the built environment.
Timothy Patitsas:And but they both also use the image of fire. She says that that city structure, you should think of it not in terms of streets or grand boulevards or particular, you know, but think of it in terms of those regions of the city that are most alive, that most vital. And she says think of it in city structure instead as you have a field at night, and each of those centers of vitality are bonfires across the field. That's your city structure, is that network of bonfires. And, you know, a big theme of the of the the ethics of beauty is prefer quality information over potent information.
Timothy Patitsas:I'm I'm not saying you have no concern for potent information, but prefer quality information over potent information. For example, to decide that you have this or that psychological complex, this or that hang up, this or that personality disorder, that's extremely potent information. Like moths to a flame, we think that that's our deliverance until we enter it and and are burned. But what you want is quality information about yourself. Where do I feel most alive?
Timothy Patitsas:What does inspire me? If I have a task that I can't avoid and I don't like, why am I am I willing to endure this? Or maybe there's some aspect I do love about it, or what would make this life giving? Like, maybe if my two best friends are with me or and then, you know, we clean my garage and then theirs and then, you know, whatever it is, society and this whole efficiency thing tells you relentlessly you're a loser and you're you're a burden on society unless you prefer potent information and act accordingly. And the purpose of of these various priesthoods, artists, and and mothers of young children and writers and priests themselves is to say, go easy.
Timothy Patitsas:Do not get addicted to potent information. Seek high quality information. Act according to that.
Christine Perrin:That is an incredibly helpful distinction. And how did Jane Jacobs do that in the city and with the ballet of the city street?
Timothy Patitsas:You know, people who were destroying our cities were always looking for this mass statistical studies of the cities and then trying to reduce reduce that information to these potent insights. Like, we need so much, you know, park per person, so much ground clearance per, you know, if we if we make this a one way street, it will flow 20% faster. It was always always always like, you know, if you don't care for potent information, you're the enemy of progress. And, you know, she she just said, you know, to one of these these, you know, city destroyers, and she was physically with the man, she said, yeah. You you've you've built this this new housing project that you're so proud of.
Timothy Patitsas:It's it's clean lines and it's efficient, whatever. But all the people are on the other side of the street, and that's where all the vitality is. And no one's on your side. No one cares for it. And, you know, she said that, you know, his reaction was just blank stare.
Timothy Patitsas:And and she knew that he was walking a walking dead man. He had sold his soul to potent information. Right? When I teach my students about this, the heroin analogy is the best one I can think of because because that approach, just relentless efficiency in any system, is so addictive. And the more you take it, the more you've got to keep taking it to build that.
Timothy Patitsas:Venture Capital takes over Panera Bread. We're gonna save a penny a loaf on the bread and then another penny, another penny, and by the end, you know, the bread is so bad that the company is bankrupt. But, you know, anyone who argued in favor of quality was told, you know, you're a, you know, you're a loser and
Christine Perrin:That's very helpful, and it makes me wanna ask you one last question, which is not fair because it's more than one question. But I'd love to just end by talking about some beauty first pedagogies or beauty first aspects of teaching that you hope will stay in the classroom and the homeschool and, you know, regardless of whether it's k through 12 or college or or seminary. What are the things that you've stumbled upon? I can tell you that when Nadia and I spoke, she is an avid student of your book and uses it. And she mentioned that for her coming from Russia and starting school here at age 15 without much English, the talking in small groups of people about books that her professor her teachers in high school felt were so important.
Christine Perrin:And she she said she realized too they were teaching to the adult she would become, not the student and child that she was at the moment. That that really changed her life. That beauty first pedagogy of reading a hard book and talking about it with people who care and and have dignity towards you. You know, they honor your dignity. So that's just one that we discussed.
Christine Perrin:But you and I have talked about others, and we can make a list or we can talk deeply about one or two.
Timothy Patitsas:Gosh. That that reminds me one of my favorite stories actually ever is Barack Obama when he was a little kid. You know, he was growing up in Indonesia at one time for many years. And his mother, you know, an American woman, was making sure that he didn't lose his English and didn't lose the ability to speak it with an American accent and so he could go back to his country and just fit in and become president. And, and to to to to get him these extra English lessons, they would have to wake up at, 4AM every morning and travel across the city.
Timothy Patitsas:And, you know, after months of this, he said, moms, just this is so hard. I mean just don't you know and she said it's not easy for me either. He's like why are you making me do this? And he understood my god you know she's she's preserving the man I will become. She's, you know, she's fighting for him, and and I'm gonna fight him on remarkable.
Timothy Patitsas:Side.
Christine Perrin:That's remarkable that he realized that. I think it would have been easy for that conversation to go a different way.
Timothy Patitsas:I think sometimes in monasteries, happens that, you know, what pulls all the young monks along is seeing or the young nuns along is seeing the the incredible sacrifice that the abbot or abbess is making just to keep going at their advanced age. They see the beauty of that person, and they see the willingness to pay the price to keep on going. But I think another way to do beauty first is to is to is to teach to the problem, to really give you know, really start with a challenge to students and let them handle it on their own for a while and give them a few clues. And, of course, you gotta find a problem that means something to them. Because certainly for me, you know, this is, I think, more of a professor, you know, a you know, university level thing than it might be for, let's say, k through 12 or something.
Timothy Patitsas:But we just wanna give them the final answer that has been discovered over the last three thousand years. And they have no problem that that is answering. Our solution is a solution to nothing that they have grappled with. And so they try to please us by learning the solution. They try to imitate our excitement about the solution.
Timothy Patitsas:But in the in the end, we're talking to ourselves. And and I think it's just really I find it at least hard to remember that and to come up with the problem each week, you know, or each lecture that or just in general, like, you know, for the semester. Like, what what is it that you're really I'm teaching religion in America now. It's a new course for us in our theology major. And to me, the problem is so obvious.
Timothy Patitsas:I've been moving here my whole life seeing all these denominational labels. Where did all this come from? But I don't know that that is their problem, my my contemporary undergrad. So I I'm trying to spark it, but I haven't found the handle yet. So it's it's not effective pedagogy.
Timothy Patitsas:I'm learning a lot. But I think I have to be honest. It's not I'm not quite getting there.
Christine Perrin:I'm remembering a list that we tried to make. One was
Timothy Patitsas:Oh.
Christine Perrin:Going to concerts when you're learning music. Another was going to art museums, that being part of the classroom. Another is I mean, the way that I would say in literature, what you just said about religion in America class, is that I want them to immerse in the text, in the language, and have a response that isn't analytical first. Because they have to sit at the feet of that person who's a giant before they have anything to say about what that person really is doing, or, you know, putting that person next to another person that's also a giant. So I wanna slow down perception.
Christine Perrin:I want to have them immersed in the language, the characters if it's a novel, the lines if it's a poem. I want it to be in their ears, in their mouth. And I want some of what's elicited from them to be pre analytical. So I have tried to devise ways of doing this. I also want them to orient towards literature as something that could answer for them, similar to what you're saying, answer their contemplative life or their problem solving life, not in a an instrumental way, but in a sense that, well, let's see what these writers say about x, y, or z.
Christine Perrin:And let's just steepen that and see what how that stimulates our thoughts. So I've come up with a few things that help them do that in in my discipline that I've come now to see since your book and the this language of Beauty First that that's part of it. Not that the analytical is not part of beauty as well, but that that encounter, that theophany is really important.
Timothy Patitsas:Well, it is. Analytical is, but it's important to say that the feeling is cognitive. It already is.
Christine Perrin:Great point.
Timothy Patitsas:So so we're we're skipping, and and normally, I don't know who is, someone bad is skipping the idea that your aesthetic response is already information. And how often in life we know something and we ignore that knowledge, and then we get into trouble because we don't know how to put that knowledge into a geometric equation. But it's legitimate is I mean, if if if someone doesn't like the language of beauty first, that is truth already. It's just truth beauty is truth in a different mode, and truth is beauty in a different mode. And it's just, you know, these things are meant to unfold concentrically, and I love I love what you're saying just that, you know, begin with some immersion.
Timothy Patitsas:I I really think about this, you know, for travel. Like, people are going too much to see places and buildings and this and that, and they're not thinking enough in terms of going for the religious festival in that place or for the public festival in that place or the some people are. They go, you know, the running of the bulls or something, but I think there has to be more of that in our approach to seeing the world. It's not just a dead place. Participate in an event with the people who live there.
Christine Perrin:Go to the saunas in Norway, for instance. I mean Yes. That might be people do clothe themselves in the saunas in Norway. But I mean, that's where people are sitting around talking because it's the end of their week, and they're just being they're just living their pattern out, and you're entering their pattern. You know, it doesn't even have to be something grand.
Christine Perrin:It can be a dailyness. It could be the grocery store. I love going to grocery stores
Timothy Patitsas:Yes.
Christine Perrin:Just seeing what the what do people wanna buy here? You know? How much does it cost? I noticed that in some countries, the, you know, the quality is really high. And we might have that quality, but it costs five times as much to buy.
Christine Perrin:It's for the wealthy people. It's not what every person expects in this other country just as a baseline good. So, yeah, I I love that. I love what you're saying about travel. That's a great application.
Christine Perrin:And I think we'll end there, except I wanna give you a chance. I mean, we're back at this quality without a name, and I wanna give you a chance to say maybe a pattern that you hope to adopt that you haven't yet. Mhmm. You know, you talked about the paper route, and you talked about other things in the classroom. But is there a a living pattern that you're laboring to acquire or hoping to acquire or realizing you you need to acquire or in the midst of acquiring?
Christine Perrin:And can you tell us about it?
Timothy Patitsas:I seem like I'm always tweaking with those tweaking those things, you know, like small things. Like, you know, you hear these athletes, the first thing they do in the morning is drink a a glass of water with lemon juice in it or something. I've been fooling around with that lately, and I it seems I don't know what I'm doing, but it seems great. This year for for Lent, you know, I I I really love the liturgical seasons calendar that Beauty First Films makes. I mean, I'm part of Beauty First Films, but I don't really design the calendar.
Timothy Patitsas:Tamaida does that, my coworker. And it's a work of art. I mean, each each spread is a work of art. But this year, as I go through Lent, at the end of the day, I'm just writing a big number. I'm counting the days of Lent.
Timothy Patitsas:So I'm filling the whole square with, you know, number two, number three, just because I wanna have more of the sense this year that Lent as a life giving pattern is, you know, is not just something to to endure kind of sullenly, but, you know, it's forty days. That's it. And I don't know. Just this I don't know. This this feels good.
Timothy Patitsas:It feels more like I'm not just getting lost in this vague sense of the impossibility of the task.
Christine Perrin:That's wonderful. That's wonderful. My mind is lighting up with all kinds of things, but I was thinking of it as a desert garden. You know, the garden where you have to look a little more closely at those tiny little buds on the cactus, but yet it's just full of fruit that's beautiful. Spare.
Christine Perrin:It's spare. It's Euclidean.
Timothy Patitsas:Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And and I think another pattern is is to seek, you know, quality information about the people around us.
Christine Perrin:If we
Timothy Patitsas:think someone is not trustworthy, if we think someone has, is unreliable or a person is, you know, we think they're arrogant or just whatever the thing is, that is very potent information. And if we like like I said, the moth with the flame, you you have to let go of that kind of stuff, and you have to seek quality information about the people around you. What inspires them? What brings out the best in them? What you know, that's how a a relationship can arise, you know, when we attend to each other in that deeper way.
Timothy Patitsas:And, you know, if if it's your child, not just that they're lazy or that they're late or that they're that they that they're they talk too much or what whatever, but always having that scan in our heart going of, like, for this particular child, you know, what what sparks life in them? And and not that, you know, you don't have to do the other things, you know, like, hey, it's this or that discipline or whatever, but always cultivate that thing too and look for those moments. And a lot of times, you know, just the the and I don't wanna I don't wanna overemphasize that because a lot of in in normal society, a lot of times, the parents are so overwhelmed. They just do focus on the on the the the the push points, and it's the grandparents who who cultivate the quality information about your
Christine Perrin:child. Nice.
Timothy Patitsas:So as long as someone's doing it, you know, it's good. We're good.
Christine Perrin:That's lovely. And you gave us an example of how that can happen even united with the things you have to do, such as the paper route. You know, the you gave such a beautiful description of that in our beginning. I would would you read for us, or should I read if you don't have it nearby, a bit of that poem, from Dionysius at the beginning of your book?
Timothy Patitsas:Let's see here. From this beauty comes the existence of everything, each being exhibiting its own way of beauty. For beauty is the cause of harmony, of sympathy, and of community. Beauty unites all things and is the source of all things. Beauty is the great creating cause which bestirs the world and holds all things in existence by the longing inside them to have beauty.
Timothy Patitsas:And there it is ahead of all as goal, as the beloved, as the cause toward which all things move since it is the longing for beauty which actually brings them into being. Beauty is a model to which they conform. From the one, the good, the beautiful, the interrelationship of all things in accordance with capacity. From the one, the good, the beautiful, the harmony and the love which are formed between them, but which do not obliterate identity. From the one, the good, the beautiful, the innate togetherness of everything.
Timothy Patitsas:From the one, the good, the beautiful also, the intermingling of everything, the persistence of things, the unceasing emergence of things.
Christine Perrin:Thank you so much.
Timothy Patitsas:Go Dionysius.
Christine Perrin:Absolutely. And Timothy Patitsas, thank you so much for this
Timothy Patitsas:Christine, thank you.
Christine Perrin:Hour.
Christine Perrin:You've been listening to Composed with Christine Perrin, a podcast of the Humanitas Institute about composing well lived lives of virtue, craft, community, and delight.