'Our Ignorance of the Most Common Objects'

My middle son is reading a book by the late J.E. Gordon titled Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down (1978). Michael is a third-year midshipman in computer engineering at the U.S. Naval Academy. Gordon’s book is more concerned with civil and mechanical engineering, with an emphasis on his still-evolving academic field, materials science, but the book is aimed at curious, non-specialist readers. While leafing through it I noticed the author takes his epigraph from Dr. Johnson’s Idler essay published on November 25, 1758: 

“Among the innumerable mortifications that waylay human arrogance on every side, may well be reckoned our ignorance of the most common objects and effects, a defect of which we become more sensible, by every attempt to supply it. Vulgar and inactive minds confound familiarity with knowledge, and conceive themselves informed of the whole nature of things when they are shown their form or told their use; but the speculatist, who is not content with superficial views, harasses himself with fruitless curiosity, and still as he inquires more, perceives only that he knows less.”

 

To be a true polymath today is probably impossible. Knowledge metastasizes, as does specialization. Johnson himself seemed to know a little about everything, even chemistry. The wall between STEM and the humanities has never seemed so forbidding. Most engineers don’t read poetry. Most poets don’t dabble in differential equations. I write for an engineering school and could probably explain the workings of an internal-combustion engine, but CRISPR and indoor plumbing leave me baffled. You and I might have a stimulating conversation about Shakespeare or Nabokov, but just yesterday I wrote a story for work with reference to “NP” (nondeterministic polynomial time), and I still feel like an idiot. I know from experience that the most reliable way to learn about the world is to read and write about it. In his “Introductory Note” to The Hunter Gracchus (1996), Guy Davenport comes close to identifying writing with teaching and, by implication, learning:

 

“The way I write about texts and works of art has been shaped by forty years of explaining them to students in a classroom. I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics, but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things.”