'The World Has Always Seemed to Me So Various'

I dropped out of university after my junior year in 1973 and didn’t return to campus to complete my B.A. in English until 2003. The lack of a degree never got in the way of working for almost a quarter-century as a newspaper reporter. I suspect a degree in most non-STEM professions is redundant. After earning my long-deferred degree, and in a state of mental exhilaration, I contemplated going after a Ph.D. I was fifty years old. Every faculty member I consulted at Skidmore College, including the novelist Steven Millhauser, told me it would be a waste of time. I was briefly disappointed but they were right.  

In one of his essays Guy Davenport observed that Americans are the first people in history to possess documented proof of their illiteracy: Just ask them to produce a college degree. He wrote that in the seventies, when the trivialization of higher education was well underway but not yet complete. I have no regrets though occasionally I wish I had become a welder after high school – a real job, one that contributes.

 

A reader has asked whether she should return to college after dropping out several years ago. She’s still young, not yet thirty. Advice is dangerous stuff. If taken and the outcome is unhappy, the advice-giver has set himself up for resentment and blame. Rather, I urged my reader to examine her motives and expectations. She’s smart and better-read than most of her contemporaries, so a typical college curriculum could crush her. I shared Dr. Johnson’s advice to Boswell: “to have as many books about [. . .] as I could; that I might read upon any subject upon which I had a desire for instruction at the time.”

 

In a 2011 essay on the nature of evil Theodore Dalrymple describes his reading strategy, and in it I recognize my own:

 

“Often I read more than one book at a time. When I tire of one I fly to another. This is because the world has always seemed to me so various and so interesting in all its aspects that I have not been able to confine my mind to a single subject or object for very long; therefore I am not, never have been, and never will be the scholar of anything. My mind is magpie-like, attracted by what shines for a moment; I try to persuade myself that this quality of superficiality has its compensations, in breadth of interest, for example.”

 

Dalrymple’s approach suggests that my reader, regardless of her decision, will never have reason to ever again be bored or rudderless.