'The Only Information I am Seriously Interested In'

I’ve met three or four people who might accurately be described, even by others, as extremely “well-informed.” Most were journalists, whose jobs depend on keeping up with things, a virtue I have never possessed. These were men who had not only absorbed vast quantities of information – and that’s all “news” ever is – but were able to access it, articulate its essence and render an analysis instantaneously. An admission that they might have to “look up” something would have embarrassed them. 

Knowing stuff was a moral obligation for them, though what they knew tended to be current and thus tinged with provinciality. The present, after all, is a historical backwater. These men were smart and could readily think on their feet but had little historical knowledge of anything that had happened before, to be tactful, 1914. A winningly cynical editor I knew referred generically to such an exhaustive and exhausting approach to journalism as “a five-part series on the economy of Bulgaria” – and this was pre-1989.

 

In the Winter 1995 issue of The American Scholar, Joseph Epstein, then the journal’s editor, published the essay “An Extremely Well-informed SOB,” in which he shares my sense of ignorance. Epstein, of course, is a notably well-read man:

 

“Given all this reading--maybe it adds up to four or five hours a day--you might think me an extremely well-informed SOB. Funny, but I don’t in the least feel well-informed. If anything, I feel less and less informed as the years go by. Once upon a time, and not so long ago as all that, one could posit what an educated man or woman ought to know: what languages, what historical narratives, what works of philosophy, literature, music, and art.”

 

I once suggested to a young reporter during Desert Storm that if he wanted insight into the first Iraqi war he ought to read Homer’s Iliad. Naturally, he thought I was kidding. Everyone has a right to a hobby, whether collecting scrimshaw or baseball cards. Following the news is a benign hobby at least until it becomes fodder for argument. Seldom voiced is the notion that obsessively following current events is a form of egotism (not that dissenters from this camp are paragons of humility). Epstein continues:

 

“What, really, is the point of being well-informed? Perhaps the first answer to that question is that it relieves one of the embarrassment of seeming ignorant. Having information, knowing the score, the true gen (as Hemingway called it), the real lowdown, brings a thrill of its own special kind. Not only does it separate one from the ignoranti--cognoscenti 48, ignoranti 0--but it gives one the feeling that one is living the life of one's time.”

 

Some of us prefer living the life of Dr. Johnson’s or Emily Dickinson's time. Epstein offers a convincing explanation for why people want to amass reams of stuff that will soon be irrelevant and forgotten: “I suppose one of the reasons for being well-informed on everything is so that one can have an opinion on everything. The culture seems very opinionated just now.” And that was thirty years ago, an era that seems from our vantage almost humble and blissfully uninformed. Perhaps it comes down to knowing how to distinguish the important from the trivial – a gift that seems increasingly rare. Here is Epstein’s conclusion:

 

“With the information revolution closing in, I ask myself whether it isn’t possible to live deeper down, at some more genuine, less superficial level of life than that promised by an endless flow of still more and then yet again even more information. It has taken me a good while to understand this, but it turns out that the only information I am seriously interested in is that about the human heart, and this I cannot find any easy way to access, not even with the best of modems, fiber-optic cable, or digital technology. Pity, though, to have to miss out on another revolution.”

 

[Epstein’s essay is collected in Narcissus Leaves the Pool: Familiar Essays (1999).]