'Bracing and Beautiful'

“The world is so various and rich that there are universes of knowledge that I will never touch (bird watching, mountain climbing, knitting patterns, on and on) but the knowledge that knowledge is endless is bracing and beautiful.” 

I suppose it ought to intimidate or shame us, how little we know. Instead, it’s a goad to further learning. I recall in a rush of puberty-driven pride resolving, like Doc Savage, to know everything – Chinese history, welding, herpetology. More than sixty years later, I still know almost nothing about those disciplines and remain strictly amateur. I’m left with a mind like a prospector’s pan, revealing the occasional nugget of ore but mostly stones.

 

The learned man quoted at the top is Rabbi David Wolpe, writing on, of all places, Twitter – proof that wisdom might be encountered almost anywhere humans choose to venture. Among the saddest spectacles I know is an incurious mind, one without a sense of wonder or intellectual hunger, especially among young people. They face the prospect of a barren, tiresome existence. You hear it argued than learning beyond the purely utilitarian is a needless luxury, a waste of time leading to discontent – as though only the privileged are worthy of learning. It’s when studying – lately, Aristotle and Italian – or reading any challenging text that I feel most in touch with my forebears, the writers and thinkers who came before me. Learning never occurs in a vacuum, at least for this reader. We're always accompanied by teachers. Boswell recounts Dr. Johnson telling him:

 

“Why, Sir, that knowledge may in some cases produce unhappiness, I allow. But, upon the whole, knowledge, per se, is certainly an object which every man would wish to attain, although, perhaps, he may not take the trouble necessary for attaining it.”