Books on "another sort of learning"

Every now and then, one discovers a new source of wisdom that makes connections between what one already halfway knows and what one hasn't yet imagined.  With my attention lately pulled this way and that by everything from the logistics of running a household to the brain changes of middle age, I particularly appreciate any book or essay that can help me make these connections and bring the half-digested ideas lying around in my mind into a coherent whole.  

I think I've just discovered one of those sources:  The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) Student Guides.  I bought the whole set of them a couple of weeks ago because, knowing how long it takes me to develop my thoughts on any subject, I have begun collecting articles and books on college for C.Z.  Though I've only been reading about college at a leisurely pace over the past three months or so, I've already found my ideas on the subject sharpening.  So it pays to seek out books that help develop one's purpose, whatever your stage of life.

As is clear from my last post, I would like for other students, including my daughter, to have a better idea of why they're going to college than I did when I went to art school--to be able to form, and then to have the courage to live out, their convictions.  And that is exactly what the first volume I've read, A Student's Guide to Liberal Learning, by James V. Schall, S.J., helps to accomplish. It's really more of a long essay than a book, but it provides a whole framework for how and why one should educate himself in the classics, the books that help one think about what life is about in the big sense. Schall's premise is that there is something wrong with liberal learning as it is presented in colleges these days, especially in elite colleges, so students needs to take matters into their own hands and find an overarching purpose through reading on their own. 

Schall writes:

Eric Voegelin, in his book on Plato, said that after the death of Socrates in Athens, philosophy fled from the city to the Academy. We live in a time evidently when truth is fleeing the Academy.

...While uneasily following, probably for an eventual job, whatever curriculum he has selected or is given, [a perceptive student] will nonetheless begin to look about on his own.  He needs a certain practical good judgment.  At a deeper level, he searches for some way to go; he must, in other words, find "another sort of learning."   

I remember doing just that in college through reading the Bible and the works of C.S. Lewis repeatedly. Disturbed by legalistic street preachers who provided hours of entertainment for the beer-swilling set, I remember discovering Isaiah's passage about the Messiah not snuffing out the bruised reed. Harassed by classmates and professors who espoused a conveniently materialistic worldview, I remember exactly where I was (in a bus barreling down hairpin turns in Tuscany) and how merrily relieved I felt when I read Lewis' argument that miracles are, by definition, not typical according to the laws of nature, so the argument that they're impossible because they break the laws of nature is a straw man. Like people in the first century didn't know the the Virgin Birth was unusual? That much is in Mary's reply to the angel!  

If reading Lewis did this much to help me, what more might I have learned if I'd know about a few other sane authors as well? For I had no idea as yet about the host of other voices out there waiting to be discovered--Chesterton, Belloc, Walker Percy, Russell Kirk, and so many others. They are a cloud of witnesses, not hiding from difficult questions, but confronting them head on and then passing down their wisdom to others.

Schall's book, and all the other student guides on various subjects, are short guides to what the life of the mind should ideally be, but in a framework that isn't likely to be presented in the modern college. Schall's book contains many inset boxes with suggestions for other books "to keep sane by." He says that good books almost always beget other book suggestions. He talks about how valuable re-reading is, because questions that perplex one at 20, 30 and even 40 might become clear at 50 or 60. He even forgives the reader for accumulating more books than he can realistically read. (This is my kind of author!) I wish I'd had these guides when I was 19, but I'm happy enough to have them now. I hope through them to bring together a few more thoughts that will help keep me on the right track, as much in middle and old age as they might have during youth, because my view is to eternity.