Since I’m in the last two weeks of the semester, I’ve returned to the below passage from Alan Jacobs’s The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (2011), which reminds me why practicing perseverance in matters of the mind is so important.

Some forms of intellectual labor are worth the trouble. In those times when Whim isn’t quite enough, times that will come to us all, we discover this. Such work strengthens our minds, makes us more capable of concentration, teaches us patience—and almost certainly a touch of humility as well, as we struggle to navigate the difficult (if elegant) terrain of Hume’s prose. But what do we have more need for, in our whirling mental worlds, than strength and concentration and patience and humility? These are virtues worth aspiring to, especially because they lead to new and greater delights. (50)