I’m secretly a dreamer. For a long time now, I’ve had this fantasy that we could bring the humanities back into everyday life. I want there to be quiet pubs where I could listen to someone read James Joyce, and coffee shops where you can learn the history of philosophy while you sip your mocha. I want a world where everyone takes life drawing classes and curls up with famous authors at night and dresses nicely and speaks politely just because it makes the world a more civilized place. I dream of a world where so many people love to study and learn that you don’t need an elite institution to teach you Latin or guide you through the Impressionists–you can just grab a group of friends and figure it out together.

I dreamed all this before I’d even heard of Dark Academia, and I was a bit shocked to find I wasn’t alone in my dream. Sure, some Dark Academics just want to wear plaid and look smart without actually reading, but surprisingly many of us want to actually read books and understand art and actually know things while wearing plaid. It’s a small subculture. It’s probably not about to usher in my dream world. But it’s nice to know I’m not the only one with dreams like these.

Dark Academia focuses a lot on the humanities–languages, literature,art, music, history, and philosophy. What humans do and have done, what we have loved and hated. Some people call Dark Academia white and Eurocentric, but the humanities themselves are everyone’s. If Dark Academia is too white and Eurocentric, it’s only because the humanities have been gatekept too much by white Eurocentric institutions. Bringing them back into everyday life is probably the first crucial step in rediscovering the diversity of human art and experience, and I do see a diverse crowd of people participating in the Academia aesthetics.

Institutions can be incredibly useful for organizing knowledge, for tracing the currents of art and history and laying them out for us amateurs, for giving at least a few of us chances for truly deep and focused study and advancement. But the study of humanity must always come from and come back to the lives of all humans. Institutions help preserve knowledge and art, but it’s generally people outside academia advancing art and making history. Just as you find great runners by making running popular and putting tracks and marathon routes all over the world, you find great artists and writers and even historians by making these things popular and making art and literature and history accessible to anyone who’s interested.

Maybe it’s all just a silly dream. Maybe it’s all about drinking coffee and wearing jackets with elbow patches. But maybe, just maybe, Dark Academia will produce the next Mary Shelley or Langston Hughes. Or a whole generation of people that know who those are. I could be happy with that.