A reader has sent me yet another lengthy screed about the State of the World and it leaves me as ignorant as I was before reading most of it. I know little about politics and nothing about economics, and I can’t muster the grit to change that situation. The writer seems like a bright, certainly well-educated guy but overly dependent on jury-rigging a grand unified theory of everything, rather like Coleridge is his gaseous phase. I defer to Dr. Johnson in The Rambler for July 9, 1751:
“Nothing has so exposed
men of learning to contempt and ridicule as their ignorance of things which are
known to all but themselves. Those who have been taught to consider the
institutions of the schools as giving the last perfection to human abilities are
surprised to see men wrinkled with study, yet wanting to be instructed in the
minute circumstances of propriety, or the necessary form of daily transaction;
and quickly shake off their reverence for modes of education which they find to
produce no ability above the rest of mankind.”
Johnson, ever the no-nonsense realist. One of his admirers, Flannery O’Connor, writes on October
26, 1963, my eleventh birthday, to her friend “A.” (Elizabeth “Betty” Hester):
“Who do you think you understand?
If anybody, you delude yourself. I love a lot of people, understand none of
them. This is not perfect love but as much as a finite creature can be capable
of.”
Systemic lupus erythematosus killed O’Connor nine months later, at the age of thirty-nine. You can find the complete letter in The Habit of Being (ed. Sally Fitzgerald, 1979). O’Connor serves as a literary palate cleanser. Like Johnson, she abhorred nonsense and intellectual pretentiousness.
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