(For my students in Fall 2026 and beyond, from the revised introduction to my next book.)
When we remember, when we try harder, when we feel joy, when we think and dwell in moments that stretch us, we build capacity. In my teaching and life, capacity means the kind of inner energy and reserve you call on when you need it, which can be encouraged and nurtured but not always directly taught. For students and for me. I go forward alongside my students because, in indigenous activist Lilla Watson’s words, their liberation is bound up with mine.[ii] Because at that table in Venice, I made them a promise. Building your capacities is my mission in life, I said, my professional reason for being. If my teaching doesn’t build your capacity for this future, then I’m not doing my job. I promise you, right now, I will be here with you. To build. Wherever it is we are going.
Building our capacities (for you and me) means we have to consider what our mentors are advising. It means we have to read, write, think, talk, argue, hang out, explore, wander, and dream alongside one another. It means each of us has to challenge ourselves, including with real emotions and apparently answerless questions. Not all of these can or should be avoided. In contrast to what our would-be tech gods would have you believe, not everything about life can or should feel comfortable all the time. That stuff coming at you through your phone only feels as if it builds you up: it actually distracts you, isolates and scatters you, atrophies the meaning-seeking muscles you need. Books and ideas and his/stories and experiences out in the world, with people and things that aren’t you or algorithmically tailored to you in advance, can build you up from inside. They can help you not be alone in your life and your own head. They can give you some gripping surfaces for your climb over some very slippery rocks. They can help you grow into comfort with mystery, with complexity, with that which isn’t you or comfortable in the same hometowns or languages as you or congruent with what you think you already know. They can show you the whole world – past, present, and future. Stories (written and read) rewild, renew, and restore you – from the inside out. And the kinds of experiences they give come on pages – not screens.[iii] Engaging those experiences starts with you – first in Paideia 111, then in specific courses in your major and beyond.
Why change the way we’re doing things? Look at the world: woven with joys large and small, we see an enragingly trivial, distinctively twenty-first-century disaster, fed by our own choices every day. AI slop everywhere. The world’s first trillionaire. An illegal war of choice. Schoolchildren being asked to write their own obituaries as part of an active-shooter drill.[iv] A global pandemic. Outright lies and lawbreaking by our ostensible political leaders. Real doubt about what college is for. “I feel like corporations have stripped all the copper wire out of the house,” says student Ben, “and my generation’s just trying to turn on the lights.” Economists agree: “[P]revious generations,” writes Johann Kurtz, “received an enormous stock of social capital: trusted neighbors, functional public schools, a productive courtship culture, predictable career arcs, and a public square in which children could roam and adults could be relied upon. That stock, once given for free, has now been substantially liquidated. Instead, the young must now buy back, item by item and at retail prices, what their grandparents received as a bounty of prior civilizational investments,” out of incomes that are not keeping pace with the cost of living and may now be further decimated by AI.[1] We deserve better than this. You deserve better than this. And meaningful contact with the world offscreen – including the past, and its art, and its stories – will help you build a self with the capacities to ask and work for something more. No matter what the future holds for you and the field you hope to enter.
With every passing year, I work harder and think deeper about how to prepare students for a world being constantly reshaped by forces none of them asked for: AI and climate change. And I keep coming back to one truth: although the screen-focused world they’ve inherited has taught them to turn away from experiences in offscreen reality (in the form of texts on paper, physical work, and encounters with other beings), those are – sadly ironically – the very same experiences they need to keep building the human agency AI is now taking away, especially when climate change can alter our reality quickly and without warning. Therefore, having those experiences and building a range of capacities in and for offscreen life (which starts in our classroom) will make you less replaceable – especially since jobs relying on person-to-person or person-to-physical-world contact are inherently less replaceable by AI.
In the Center for Humane Technology’s podcast (August 13, 2026), Molly Kinder says that although most discussion of our employment futures assumes that AI will put us all out of work (with or without universal basic income) or that AI will make everyone’s job easier, we need to plan for “the messy middle,” when many of us, especially so-called “knowledge workers,” are already seeing losses to AI but the future isn’t clear.[2] “If you can do your job locked in a closet with a computer,” she says, “AI can do your job.” So now more than ever, we need to make ourselves people who receive, and know how to build, inputs, experiences, and shared stories from what Matthew Crawford calls “the world beyond our heads” – curiosity, empathy, and engagement with life. “Humans don’t run on truth,” says Tom Parker of the Financial Times, “we run on shared stories. And whoever controls the story controls the species.”[3]
As I tell my students, you’re more likely to survive in whatever’s coming next, whatever your field, if you can do three big things:
1) see what’s at stake in the present moment (and how we got here);
2) “read” the text, the situation, and the story before you as it is with appropriate time and attention; and
3) act with curiosity and compassion in your world, knowing it’s an inherently marvelous, multiplicitous, mysterious, and never-quite-predictable place.
Literature and history are among the greatest inventions humans have ever built to help ourselves do all three.
A distinguished scholar and academic dean I know died of Parkinson’s disease. When his family cleared out his house, they found a box labeled BOOKS: PART OF SELF. Almost a decade later, I told this story to a student, Jack, who was writing about how all he’d read as an English major (especially John Donne and Philip Sidney) had helped him navigate his growing-up and coming-out. “Books,” he repeated. His eyes shone. “Part of self.” In his hands were two books he’d just plucked from the free pile outside my office. “And see,” I found myself saying, throat prickling, eyes welling, “as a teacher, I give self away. That’s my job.” So: that’s why I’m writing this book. For you. To put myself out there with you. To try and point a way forward into the future by pointing back to the past. To offer better stories to understand the world and your position in it.
Hearing this, student Racheal asks me a great question: “why do you think the Romantic writers in particular are the ones with the most to teach us right now?” Because the Romantics, I think, were the first to face our own biggest challenge: how to live meaningfully with ourselves and others (including nonhumans) alongside machines in the world machines continuously make and remake at a global scale. It’s a big claim, but I believe it: the Romantic world, including its natural and human realities, were rocked and reshaped by machines in a way no previous worlds had ever been, and Romantic writing – which still endures as some of the greatest art humans have ever made – grapples with that in ways that still speak directly to us. Once a machine can do your job – and as I’ll say in Ch. 6, what we mean by “machine” is changing too – what happens to you, and your understanding of your place in the world, and how you get your living? When society’s being shaken up by industrial revolution (that loaded word), where might previously marginalized people (women, gay men, slaves) and unseen issues get shaken out of their corners and thrust into the light? What questions (slavery as the foundation of industrial prosperity, machines as the theft of livelihood and labor, the despoliation of the natural world as cities grow dark with smoke) become too big to ignore? When a machine can prolong a war across decades and continents, how should we understand suffering and power? Where is God? Why is it still worth trying to make art by hand? How do we find meaning in a world that seems so random and cruel? A list of the Great Themes of Romanticism (nature! Lyricism! Mortality!) doesn’t always include industrialization. But as a Romantic-obsessed teacher in 2026, when AI is reshaping my life and my students’ lives every single day, when I look at my beloved writers, I see the machine everywhere. It may not be as visible as the smartphones in every hand on my campus right now. But it’s always, always there.
So, students, this is why I ask you to turn off your smartphones and smart watches and put them in your bag as soon as you walk through the door of my classroom, even before I arrive. This is why I ask you to read and write on paper, by hand, and to listen and speak to the other humans around you. We’ve got a human world to build and rebuild. I believe we can. Let’s go.
[1] See Johann Kurtz, “Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise,” Becoming Noble (Jul 14, 2026; https://substack.com/home/post/p-206981864)
[2] https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/enough-debate-about-the-ai-jobpocalypse-we-need-to-plan-for-the-messy-middle
[3] Tom Parker interviewing Yuval Noah Harari, August 4, 2026 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_V_ed5fuexA
[ii] The full quote, from Sarah Jaquette Ray’s A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: “As indigenous activist Lilla Watson said, summarizing the sentiment of Aboriginal activist groups: ‘If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” (73)
[iii] Film colleagues, I hear you. But the loop of experience from brain to page to world and around again as I describe it in this book contains, and enriches a self with, particular textures that screens just don’t.
[iv] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/florida-teacher-fired-asking-students-write-obituaries-day-active-shoo-rcna78722