Do you all remember the first time we heard this or that professor—I would bet Baxter or Bolin for the majority of us—Say the Right Thing? Some philosophical, poetic, or theological point which made you sit up and give a wide-eyed “Wow”? Do you remember twittering about it in the hall afterwards or repeating the point later? If there is one thing which perfectly captures, for me, the spirit of our first few months at WCC—the beginning of which will be ten years ago come August 3rd—it is this wide-eyed, fervent embrace of this phenomenon. We clung to these instances as… sacramental? Sacred? At the very least it was a kind of communion, as if in hearing the Right Thing Said we felt at once affirmed and united in our choice of school: here is the reason for my being in this weird little town in this very large and weird state with these few very strange people. WCC, the weird little liberal art experiment, cries out for justification and hence we twittered over whatever appeared as another arrow in its quiver of reasons. I can only precisely recall the gist of one of these Right Thing’s Said, Dr. Bolin’s “You will never convince anyone of anything by reason.” However, this particular saying agrees more with my temperament more than the flavor I have tried to depict above, which I suppose bleeds the image of some of its color. Perhaps a better example would be Baxter’s gift for simile: describing an aresteia as the satisfaction of taking a baseball bat to every window on main street, or the possession of the divine good as the instantaneous joy of seeing your friends in Denver airport after a summer break, only stretched out into an eternity. That there were those who could speak thus and that we had chosen to sit at their feet for four years was intoxicating. That heady feeling I have not felt since and which is unlikely to return. The world is too old for that, nor has it shown itself as charged with grandeur once we began filing taxes and wading through a web of modern “conveniences” which now trip us up and hence dissuade us from looking up and about us for what grandeur we might perceive. Hearing our professors Say the Right Thing, for those first few months, shot our reality through with something which we had not known we were seeking and helped us understand our choice to attend school in Lander.

However, the significance of the phenomenon outside of how it affected us as a group has pursued me these last nine years and has recently revealed itself as I prep to teach an introductory Philosophy class in the fall. So far, I have described our experience of the phenomenon as consisting of a) an reflective element—the thing “out there” which the professor points at by Saying the Right Thing, and b) a group-identity element—the group justification for WCC or our class. We would not have found the Right Thing Said so appealing on the basis of the group-identity element alone, I think. Were that so, several of us would not have become the scholars that we became—though I suppose that kicks the can down the road, as it certainly possible that those of us who became scholars or writers did so because of some kind of group identity. Perhaps all our thought and action after WCC was informed not by reality, what is, but rather being “the right sort of people?” Let me set this to one side for now. I think it reasonable—though not demonstrable—that there was some sense of “Right” which extended beyond group justification, beyond being “the right sort of people,” some “out there” which the Right Thing Said genuinely pointed at. The Right Thing Said expresses a sentiment which Lewis describes at the climax of that Hideous Strength: when all the world has been struck with the curse of babble, and all men are incomprehensible and hostile to each other, we yearn for someone who could speak a word of reason and sanity, one who can Say the Right Thing. As we watch the political and economic edifices we once thought we merely had to learn—rather than prop up by belief or political action—begin to crumble despite our effort, we thumb the pages of First Things and scroll substack looking for someone who “has their thumb on the pulse” or “really puts his finger on it,” etc. etc. We want someone to give an account, to see the phenomenon and give us the form, we want things to coalesce and make sense, and hope that a Baxter or a Bolin or a Kozinski can do that for us. Can they? Can anyone?

I suppose one would have to answer “yes”—man by nature desires to know, and we know through the form, not the phenomenon as such, and hence anyone capable of giving a coherent account will be able to fill this role—but I think I am interested in the drive for this specific kind of coherency, one given by someone who can hit the sweet spot between erudition and common appeal; who can shrink, as much as possible, the gap between the eggheads and scholars on one hand and common working men and women on the other. It must be the Right Thing Said, not just the correct thing, if that makes sense: the head and the heart must assent at the same time to the same Thing. I might be mis-representing the phenomenon here, but that was how it felt to me, or perhaps more accurately I did not merely realize things when the Right Thing was Said but additionally felt it. Again the group-identity element rears its head: perhaps I was being dragged along by the need to be liked, to be accepted by the group? Perhaps my ego fabricated these feelings? Here I am led back to my starting point: prepping a class on the Republic and the Nicomachean Ethics. For I realized in my prep that all my academic efforts have been aimed—and will likely continue to aim—at Saying the Right Thing. Not just the educated thing, the proper thing, the appropriate thing, the group-identity thing, but the Right Thing. This entire essay is an attempt to outline to myself, more than anything, what Saying the Right Thing is, and I am still baffled. I have claimed that this arose for us as Freshmen, but what other instances can I find?

As trite as it is, I would have to point to C.S. Lewis for other examples of the Right Thing Said. His account of joy from Surprised by Joy, the description of the heavens in Out of the Silent Planet, his account of justified hatred from Perelandra—all of these are examples of the Right Thing said, in my book. But they are not merely particularly moving images or poignant passages: they teach by somehow pointing a finger both elsewhere and into the depths of the reader’s heart at the same time. The same mind reads the world and our hearts in the same act, and Says the Right Thing.

Obviously, the theologian will point out that we are simply looking for the Word, for the Christ, for the Logos, and, while I began this essay with the intent of arguing against this reading—I am, as ever, loathe to run to theology when plain philosophical sense can do the trick—I find it more difficult the more I attempt to describe the thing itself. So far, the Right Thing Said is a) some indication of form out of phenomena like all instances of understanding, and b) an indication that drives the mind and heart to assent in the same instance to the same thing without any compromise on the proper act of either. When the Right Thing is Said, the mind does not admit anything emotional and the heart does not assent to anything irrational. Lewis says in Till We Have Faces that understanding—which, in the context of that book’s narrative, is specifically greek understanding or wisdom—is clear and thin like water. The mind assents to it, but the heart is in some sense unmoved; the heart can take or leave the what wisdom to which the mind has proper access. In the book, the contrasting element is the pagan divinity, which is likened to blood: thick and rich and life-giving, but dark and in some sense defying of reason—which is not the same as being irrational. The implication of the text is that there is reconciliation of the two—bluntly, both blood and water—possible even in the pagan, un-Christianed mind, that there is some fecundity in the combination of the old divine and the new philosophy ready to accept Christ were He to appear. I think what I have begun to uncover here is how this unity serves as the end we seek as we thumb through First Things or in virtue of which we twittered outside of class during that first year at school: when we seek to Say the Right Thing or look for someone Saying the Right Thing, we are not really looking simply to justify a group identity or merely illuminate some correspondence between our minds and reality. We are looking—and, unfortunately, often accepting sorry substitutes for—the Thing Said which illumines and implicates in the same breath, which somehow probes our personal depths while indicating what is.

In short, we are characters looking for an author, one who can explain our part in the text, who can express a unity which binds both ourselves to the whole and our minds to our hearts. If there is something to be said for the WCC which educated us, it is that it opened up to us the possibility of that both-and rather than dropping the heart for the sake of the mind or disregarding the mind for the sake of some consequently vague notion of “heart.” I am reminded of the recent biopic A Complete Unknown, which relates the story of the early career of Bob Dylan. The verson of Dylan portrayed is not honest with the women he sleeps with, his lyrics are largely insincere (though brilliantly composed), and he admires certain men—Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie—not because of what they believed in, but because of the careers they found which opened the path for his own success. This Dylan—or Shabtai Zisl ben Avraham a.k.a Robert Allen Zimmerman, names he abandoned for the sake of his career—is hence aloof, stand-offish, rebellious, and focused on his art. The hippies who helped his early career were only helps to him. The hippies—who, ironically, in the context of this film, are more believers than anything else—feel deeply betrayed by Dylan’s self-serving turn to rock and roll with his album Highway 61 Revisited. We get the sense that the hippies felt betrayed by Dylan because they could not believe that lyrics such as his could come from a place of insincerity; Dylan rejects them because their insistence that he and his lyrics mean that he is one of them requires that they have some claim to know him, and that is something he cannot tolerate; he rejects being known. The early portion of the film emphasizes how little the man relates of himself to those closest to him—we never meet his parents or any family, only the women he sleeps with and emotionally abuses—and how he has stripped away everything about himself except the mind which can build a career and write successful songs. The difficulty is that the hippies are all heart and little mind, while Dylan is all mind and no heart. Hence we the audience can see both the corny, ridiculous side of the hippies which disgusts Dylan and the disregard for authenticity and sincerity which horrifies the hippies. The Christian mind, however, that which longs for the Right Thing Said and aspires to Say the Right Thing, wishes to combine the sincerity of the believing hippie and the art of the disregarding Dylan. The difficulty is that out here, away from those early days at WCC, we are often caught between a few insincere minds and a very many sincere but confused simpletons. Hence Saying the Right Thing stands as an attempt to bridge the gap between the many and the few, between the mind and the heart, one present in the gospels and only very dimly imitated by our own words and actions.