In Praise of the Rabbit Hole
The thing I miss most about college is not the classes I was supposed to take but the ones I chose: syncretic Islam across Central Asia, water politics in the Middle East, graphics processing down at the hardware level. Following a professor into whatever narrow thing they happened to love was fun. Fifteen years into a career, very little of my reading looks like that. It drifts on the currents of the publishing industry, toward the general and the safe: Western classics, business execution, another big-tech chronicle. Ravina’s course is the best argument I’ve encountered for the lecture format as a genre: the novellas of nonfiction, shorter and thinner, but aimed at a specific subject and a narrow audience willing to pay for exactly that. It reopens the rabbit hole.
It is not the deepest or best-researched treatment. The coverage of Buddhist thought does not survive scrutiny if you press on it. But I came out understanding the rise of Pure Land Buddhism, the origins of Haiku, and the modern influence of both much more than coming in. That is a fair trade for the length. A cultural history does not need to be definitive to be orienting.