'I Find Out How Little I Know'

Pessimism has its charms, chief among them being the reduced likelihood of disappointment. Even on the diminished scale of an individual life, utopia is toddler-level delusion. I still remember the cover of the April 1970 issue of Ramparts magazine, which proclaimed “Utopia Now!” I was seventeen, a senior in high school, and already knew this was dangerous nonsense. Here is a poem by the late American poet Kelly Cherry, “History” (Hazard and Prospect: New and Selected Poems, 2007): 

“It is what, to tell the truth, you sometimes feel

That you have had enough of, though of course

You do not really mean that, since you recall

It well enough to know things could be worse

And probably are going to get that way

But still want a long and memorable life, which means

Having to learn more of it day by day,

The names and dates of all the kings and queens

And those less famous who ruled the territory

Known as your heart and now are gone, by one

Dark route or another, from the plot of your story.

But you write on, and are your own best Gibbon,

And read on, this monumental subject being

The decline and fall of almost everything.”

 

Personal history and the bigger history are natural analogues. Reviewing our lives, we fashion periods, epochs, designated by the people in our life, jobs, illness or health, geography, happiness or misery. We flatter ourselves, understandably, fancying we are little Gibbons, assuming no one else knows us better than ourselves.

 

I remember learning some years ago that among Gibbon’s admirers was Iggy Pop, né James Newell Osterberg, Jr., leader of the proto-punk band The Stooges. In 1995, Pop published in Classics Ireland a brief essay titled “Caesar Lives,” in which he recounts his reading of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, first in an abridged edition and later the full six volumes. Pop lists five benefits from reading Gibbon, the most admirable being, “I find out how little I know.” 

 

In Seven Books That Everyone Once Read and No One Now Does (Ludovika University Press, 2025), Nicholas Tate acknowledges Pop’s essay and writes:

 

“It was not just the admiration that one hard-working artist had for a ‘guy’ who had ‘stuck with things’ or that the cameo illustration of Gibbon on the cover made him look like ‘a heavy dude’, but also the beauty of the language, the sense of being freed from the tyranny of the present, and the humbling revelation of ‘how little I know’. If Gibbon got it all wrong and is looking down from some other place, one can imagine the broad smile on the heavy dude’s chubby face – Gibbon was no prude – at the thought that two hundred years later his magnum opus was being read with great pleasure, to the accompaniment of drugs and whisky, around 4 a.m. in cheap motels somewhere in the American South.”