Life's Enthusiasms

David Starr Jordan, the founding president of Stanford University, wrote this celebratory meditation on finding joy in existence during an era of profound American transformation. Jordan believed that enthusiasm itself was a form of moral courage, a deliberate choice to remain buoyant amid life's inevitable disappointments. He traces the sources of this vital buoyancy through three primary channels: education, which opens new worlds and cultivates wonder; travel, which shatters parochialism and reveals humanity's shared spirit; and immersion in nature, that perpetual reminder that creation continues its grand indifferent work regardless of human affairs. Perhaps most surprisingly for a man of his station, Jordan reserves his deepest praise for the arts, not as elite accomplishments but as necessary nourishment for the restless human spirit. Literature, music, painting, sculpture: these are not luxuries but lifelines. Written with the earnest conviction of a man who believed deeply in human potential, this little essay pulses with a peculiar 19th-century optimism that feels both dated and strangely necessary today.