You can sort of have a conversation with a book. I sometimes write rude comments in the margins when I disagree with the author. But the Stoics recommend that when you’re insulted, you just ignore it. Books are incredibly advanced stoics in this regard. And it’s kind of infuriating to insult someone and have them not even notice. Conversations with books are, generally, parasocial.

I’d like to be able to have interesting ideas on my own, but as I get older, the more I find that this doesn’t happen. Ideas rarely spring up from within me, like a seep in the desert. More often, they become visible in contrast to something else.

I realize I believe something when I meet someone who believes the opposite thing. Until then my belief was just the water I swam in. I realize I stand for something when somebody tramples that thing before my eyes.

Or, ideas are drawn out of me. Someone asks a question, and I say something that I didn’t know I knew, but which seems to be true.

When I just read and think and write, that works up to a point. I am exposed to new ideas. They combine and interact with the things I already know. I write about the synthesis, or defend one idea or the other. But it’s easy to get stuck following the same old intellectual cart-tracks, wearing them deeper with each trip.

It might sound like I’m leading up to the idea that self-styled intellectuals should get out of the house and experience the world, whatever that means. No, no, no! I mean, that’s good too, but leaving the house is a lot to ask of a self-styled intellectual. A more realistic step: write really long emails to people who are at least slightly different from you.

Long conversations, whether in person or by email, draw out things I haven’t consciously thought of, but, it seems, have been mulling over in some background process for a long time. I am often surprised to discover what I think, in the process of replying to a question.

Good questions can exhaust the cache of shallow opinion, and get to things that are more deeply held and interesting, and then, after a surprisingly small number of whys, to all the things I don’t know. And that’s like a quarry for new ideas.