'Known to All But Themselves'

Suddenly, there’s nothing shameful about ignorance. I mean personally, not as an indictment of the bigger culture. There’s so much I don’t know or understand, and that knowledge of my ignorance no longer bothers me very much. I still like learning things but there was a time when I had to know everything, or at least advertise that I did. I’m no longer a polymath. I was reading an autobiographical essay, “The End of Immortality,” by the American poet David Mason when I encountered this: 

“I was only nineteen, but people thought I was smart. They called me Shakespeare because I was always reading or scribbling in a journal in downtime. I was, though, a truly mixed up kid. Immortal, true enough, but not entirely well. A cynic about everything . . .”

 

No one called me “Shakespeare” but my step-grandfather called me “Professor,” pronounced “Perfessor.” In a high-school creative writing class, the teacher instructed us to secretly select another student, choose a single adjective to describe that classmate (not physically) and share it with the class. The idea was to pick so discerningly revealing a word  that everyone would know who you were identifying  A kid I hardly knew said “critical,” and three-quarters of the class pointed at me and called my name. Keats’ notion of “negative capability” is starting to make deep sense, not as a literary phenomenon but as an aspect of character – “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason . . .” Consider the first of three definitions of ignorance in Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary: “want of knowledge; unlearnedness.”

 

I don’t mean just “book learnin’.” Without my wife, our house would have collapsed or burned down and we might be in debtor’s prison. I’m not gifted with many of  the practical skills of daily living. Pumping gas is the extent of my knowledge of automotive maintenance. I have friends who pity my hopelessness – but turn me loose on King Lear.  As Johnson puts it in The Rambler: “Nothing has so exposed men of learning to contempt and ridicule as their ignorance of things which are known to all but themselves.”

 

Anthony Daniels, aka Theodore Dalrymple, writes in his essay “A Book By Its Cover”: “To think that ignorance decreases with the advance of knowledge is to mistake the nature of infinity: for infinity minus one is still infinity.”