And what's more, Isadore, in his customary fashion, would have demanded that I define it carefully. Passion, after all, is in some disrepute in the modern world. In our post-romantic frame of mind, torn and ambivalent because in various ways we are still driven by the romantic ideal even when many of us seem to reject it intellectually, we tend to link passion to irrational impulses that might lead to fanaticism, obsession, or even abuse. Passion strikes the cool postmodern temperament as at once too passive and egotistical, too self-serving a surrender to internal cravings or overwhelmingly tempting external forces. Passion, though, can also mean something much more active and concentrated, as when we speak of a passionate absorption, a passionately committed attention to and involvement with the matter at hand.
Few people seem to have that capacity.
Isadore is one of those who did, both personally and intellectually. Such passion involves a fundamental seriousness, though not the kind of seriousness that sits heavily on the soul like puritan theology. It is more like the serious playfulness that the Dutch historian J. Huizinge describes, in his wonderful book Homo Ludens , as a civilizing virtue. Huizinge thought that this form of profound play was the heart of culture, art, and religion. From's practice, it was also the heart of psychotherapy.