The most shocking thing about discovering the Library Thing, a great website that allows you to catalog all the books you own and have read, is that you don't know much. I am struck by the truth of Larry Arnn's suggestion that there is only so much anyone can truly understand. It's better to decide early on to learn one thing of importance.
I've felt the tension of the pull of philology all my life. As a black man of my generation, one is constantly bumping into people who are agog at your sense and sensibility if you are indeed intelligent and articulate and all those other edifying qualities which are in short supply in any population. But that doesn't change the fact that there is no pre-ordained path for you. Sure, you are told that you can grow up to be president, but you don't get invited to the mayor's house.
Cobb's number one rule is "A little bit of everything adds up to a whole lot of nothing." It is the dire warning against the sin of eclexia, the addiction to novelty and alternate universes. Surely this is the temptation for everyone who lives the life of the mind. There is so much to know, why not know something of everything? Who isn't complimented by the label of 'Renaissance Man'? Jesuits taught me to be well-rounded. Isn't that what a straight-A student is? Equally good at everything? (I was the opposite in all honesty, I cared about science, French, soccer and diving in high school and little else.) I didn't learn that rule for a long time. I'm not sure I've adequately lived by it. In fact, deep down, I feel like I have all the time in the world to learn everything I want to know, so I don't mind spending five years blogging about conservative black politics while not seriously intending to make any money from it.
So it is that part of my ego that is bruised when I compare the number of books I have actually read to those other people I find at Library Thing. I'm well-read, but not really. I have entered periods of disciplined curiosity, but I'm no scholar.
I remember nights in books.
I remember reading "Around the Cragged Hill" by George F. Kennan back in the early 90s when Madonna was on her third or fourth incarnation in Vogueing. And I sat in my apartment refusing to go out and meet people because the book was more interesting than all the reality I could access without reading. I know how knowledge isolates, but for this black man it hasn't been consistently elevating. I might have been a bowel surgeon instead. I might have focused my intellectual energies on the human eye and waited for the world to ask me questions. Instead I sought the elevation that comes from having one's own curiosity satisfied. Is this the autodidact's dilemma? I don't know, I never selected that book to read.
And yet I remain fascinated by those who would consume, if their profiles are to be believed and reckoned with, two or three thousand books. I would imagine that a person completely disappears, that all their personal stories become stories experienced reading rather than negotiating the stochastics of life among fans of Madonna. It is a strength and a weakness to be the foremost American scholar of Proust. It's like balancing your entire life on one tiptoe of the mind. It is at once elevating and destabilizing. The narrow soul require more indulgences from those around him. The broad character improvises without the benefit of theory, like he's always done.
There remains that story of transformation from that movie.. and heaven forbid we start talking about film too. There once was a criminal who escaped to a house in the countryside and read a thousand books. His crimes finally caught up with him in the form of his partners in crime who got busted and did the time while he read at his leisure. He outwitted them in the end.
I may have read 500 books that I'll ever remember. Every week or so another dozen or so pop into my head, but I'm surely asymptotic to that magic number. I think it's enough to know. Maybe.
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