Sheehan Quirke is a writer who lives in England. In May 2022 he quit his job and started The Cultural Tutor on Twitter (now X) with the aim of democratising elite knowledge. Since then, he has amassed over 1.7 million followers who include world famous personalities across the cultural and political spectrum, from James O’Brien to Jordan Peterson and Professor Alice Roberts to Steven Bartlett. He also writes a fortnightly newsletter with over 75,000 readers that features seven short lessons on art, architecture, poetry, and music.
His latest title is The Cultural Tutor: 49 Lessons You Wish You’d Learned at School.
Time is the only sieve we can trust; it filters the sand and dust, leaving only the few particles of gold that are worth our attention, specks of gold that will help us, despite having being written more than two thousand years ago, to live better and more meaningfully, more nobly and humanely, in the 21st century.
How did you first become interested in classical philosophy?
I grew up in a rural English backwater. What to do in such a place? I spent time roaming the fields with my friends and investigating the lonely Medieval churches scattered across them. You could see their towers – built with ironstone, a regional subtype of limestone with a high ferric content that makes it turn rust-red in the sun – from a great distance. I was enchanted by these churches, by the way their architecture – the particular angle of a window’s arch; the specific motifs of decoration around a doorway – told in stone a story going back centuries.
Architecture might sound like a strange place to begin, but all parts of culture rise and fall together – everything a society does is interminably linked, like a diamond with a thousand facets, each reflecting off and glowing through one another. To split a diamond into a thousand fragments, trying to get the beauty from each individual facet, would be to destroy it! Culture, and all human endeavour, is just the same. To learn one thing is to learn everything. Air conditioning units say just as much about us, if not more, than the books we read or films we watch; Roman sewers say more about the Romans than the Colosseum.
Classical philosophy, then, is an expression of exactly the same thing expressed by classical statues, coins, temples, and poems. Strange though it sounds, I think reading classical philosophy is better way of understanding classical architecture than by reading books about such architecture… and, even more strangely, vice versa!
And, of course, human beings have not changed at all since the dawn of civilisation; there is no such thing as an unprecedented problem. To read the Classics is to learn ideas that have overcome the ultimate challenge: time. Any given year hundreds of thousands of books are published. Which ones should we read? There’s simply no way of telling which ones are worth reading. Time is the only sieve we can trust; it filters the sand and dust, leaving only the few particles of gold that are worth our attention, specks of gold that will help us, despite having being written more than two thousand years ago, to live better and more meaningfully, more nobly and humanely, in the 21st century.
Maybe I’m wrong about all of that – but, for good or bad, it’s what I believe.
Tell us about The Cultural Tutor.
Well, it’s a book. And like all books it is composed, in purely physical terms, of paper (wood, water, a binding agent) stuck together (glue, I suppose) and printed with symbols (ink). There will also be an electronic version, which is composed of pixels, I guess, of glass and filaments, plus the data banks where the text itself is stored.
That sounds like a pedantic answer, but I do sort of mean what I’m saying. Such is the approach I take in my book – trying to talk about familiar things in a different way, with the intention of helping readers pay renewed and closer attention to them. We’ve all seen the Mona Lisa a million times… but who is the woman we’re looking at? Hardly anybody knows. Her name was Lisa Gherardini, and she never saw the finished portrait. My book is intended to teach people a few things about what we usually call “culture” – by which I mean paintings, cathedrals, temples, love poetry, political philosophy, football, rhetoric – in a way that “culture” isn’t usually taught. Not as a series of facts to be learned, but as living and breathing beast, as a genuinely endless and eternally rewarding adventure that leads both outwards and inwards.
Though, to answer the question more directly, I should say that The Cultural Tutor is the summation and crystallisation of everything I’ve been doing for the past three years, my attempt to create an all-encompassing cultural primer for beginners and experts alike. It’s a book that gives you a little bit of everything, that helps point you in the right direction – whether that be art, architecture, poetry, philosophy, history – and, above all, gets you excited. I suppose it’s a manifesto for a different way of living in the 21st century, a manifesto for cultural enrichment as a way of life. Education is uplifting, thrilling, shocking, terrifying, and transcendent; my work, therefore, both as “The Cultural Tutor” online and in my book of the same name, is to offer an antidote to doomscrolling and an alternative to the 24 hour content cycle.
The story of a human life is merely the story of what that particular person has paid attention to over the course of whatever span of time they have been blessed with.
What are the most important concepts or ideas that you teach others?
That some things are worth knowing. It sounds trivial when you put it like that, but what I’m talking about is a matter of the supremest, most apocalyptic urgency. You can’t know everything, just like you can’t read every book. In fact, you can’t even read just one percent of all the books ever written. You couldn’t even read, in a whole lifetime, all the books published around the world on a single day of the year! In which we case we must decide what to read from among the ocean of books; we must decide what to know from among the ocean of things we might know. And, subsequent to that, I am convinced that some things are more worth knowing than others, that certain things make our lives better and other things make them worse. I suppose it doesn’t sound like a radical or even surprising idea… but the way we behave (myself included) in the 21st century says otherwise.
Perspective. The more I read history, the more I learn how little things change. We are always complaining about the same things – and I mean that literally! Untrustworthy politicians, ever-increasing rent, inflation, the inability to find a boyfriend or girlfriend, the declining quality of art… you can read 16th century Elizabethans, Ancient Athenians, Genghis Khan’s Mongols, and Medieval Japanese monks all grumbling about these very things. To have this perspective makes modern life much less troubling.
Architecture matters. The way our world looks affects how we think, feel, and behave. A fact that is very obviously true and accepted as such, but rarely acted on with sufficient care. We design our world improperly at our peril. Ordinary beauty is vital, is of unspeakable significance! Art doesn’t just belong in galleries or museums or ancient monuments sealed off behind glass panes and ropes. Art and beauty belong everywhere, belong to people, and ought to be present on each and every one of our streets and houses.
In the end, though, the north star of all my work is simply this: attention. The story of a human life is merely the story of what that particular person has paid attention to over the course of whatever span of time they have been blessed with. Really, I mean that. Any biography is a description of what a given person spent their time looking at it, where they went, who they spoke to, and so on. All these are simply forms of attention. To what, then, shall we pay attention? To reels and shorts… or to flowers, bumblebees, and the stars?
Do you have a favourite quote that you use?
The 14th century Dutchman Thomas a Kempis once said,
I would rather feel contrition than know the definition thereof.
He means it is better to live the right way, even if you can’t quite explain it, than to be able to explain it and not live it. Sometimes we think of education as the accumulation of facts, of mastering knowledge. Not at all. Education is an active moral, emotional, psychological, and spiritual force. If education does not make us happier, stronger, and more noble, if it does not help us to make better decisions, to sympathise more intensely with our fellow humans, to do the right thing, then it is not real education in any sense of the word.
What advice would you give someone who wanted to learn more about what you do?
The best place to begin is with my forthcoming book; as I said, it’s the summation and crystallisation of everything I’ve been doing for the past three years. You can buy it here. Otherwise you can follow me X or Instagram, although the best place to keep up with what I’m doing is by subscribing to me newsletter. You can do so here. The newsletter, as it happens, is called “Areopagus”. Make of that what you will!
Suppose you were able to give a talk or workshop at the original location of Plato’s Academy, in Athens.
I could hardly imagine an opportunity more thrilling or meaningful. Athens is the place where it all began, a city that has left its mark on all subsequent human history. Even if we leave Earth one day, colonise the stars, and build metropolises on far-off planets, Athens will forever remain one of the sparks that catalysed our journey, and its impression will remain on everything we humans do, for good or bad, for all eternity. Dramatic words, but I mean them! To talk or give a workshop at the original location would be add my own little pebble, my own little daub of paint, to the great cathedral of learning that is represented by the Academy. Who knows, I might even tell a joke there that nobody has ever told before… maybe!
What question would you like to leave us to think about?
What was the last thing you paid real attention to, and was it worthwhile?
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