'I Wish I Knew More About . . .'

I once worked with a middle-aged man who, when quantum physics came up in a story I was writing, showed me a video clip from a super-hero movie that was intended to demonstrate his mastery of the subject. I had to be careful. He was my boss and was histrionically touchy about anything that might challenge his knowledge of the world. Externally, I nodded my head and expressed my gratitude for his generosity in sharing his research into post-Max Planck developments in quantum theory. I couldn’t muster any anger, just a little irritation for wasting my time. Internally, I felt sorry for the son of a bitch. Poverty of imagination is sadly dispiriting. What must it feel like to be so ignorant and not suspect it? 

My metaphor for life has always been a school. I’m alive in order to know things, with the understanding that I will never know everything I wish to know. My teachers are both some of the people I have encountered in real life (foremost among them, a literature teacher in college and Guy Davenport) and their precursors in the past, via books. In “A Lament for the Printed Word” in the January issue of New English Review, Theodore Dalrymple writes:

 

“We are made for endeavour of one kind or another, and since the struggle for raw existence is in effect over, we are obliged to find the most meaningful endeavour we can. Instinctively, I feel that the pursuit of knowledge and understanding for its own sake is about as meaningful an endeavour as can be found.”

 

As usual, Dalrymple covers a lot of ground in a brief space. The essay begins with a sad acknowledgment of the growing tide of aliteracy. “Even students who have elected to study literature at university,” he writes, “so one hears, are unable to read a long novel, or find it onerous to do so, even the requirement to do so being a cause for complaint.” Then comes an even sadder acknowledgement, that erudition is “fleeting,” The most erudite people he has known are dead. “Where is their learning now?” he asks, and gets to the point:

 

“One has a natural tendency to suppose that one’s own tastes are best: that, for example, a taste for reading is morally and intellectually virtuous, in a way that most other activities are not. Is this mere snobbery, or does it have some basis in reality?”

 

Good questions, ones I’ve often asked myself. Am I as deluded as my former boss? Perhaps, which is not sufficient reason to stop reading and take up super-hero movies. Dalrymple continues:

 

“Even if it does not have such a basis, it is too late for me to change my now ingrained tastes. One of my few regrets on leaving this world will be that I have not read all that I would like to have read. Notwithstanding the decline of reading, and the lowering of academic standards, I still find, when I visit a good bookshop, that there is much, too much, being written that I wish I had time to read. I wish I knew more about marsupials, Barbary pirates, the philosophy of Spinoza, the history of Sicily, Japanese art, and so forth; and if I now know much more than I did when I was born, I shall still die infinitely ignorant.”

 

Serious readers will understand. He reminds me of a passage in the essay William Maxwell wrote, “Nearing 90,” as a very old man:

 

“Because I actively enjoy sleeping, dreams, the unexplainable dialogues that take place in my head as I am drifting off, all that, I tell myself that lying down to an afternoon nap that goes on and on through eternity is not something to be concerned about. What spoils this pleasant fancy is the recollection that when people are dead they don’t read books. This I find unbearable. No Tolstoy, no Chekhov, no Elizabeth Bowen, no Keats, no Rilke. One might as well be –.”