Blind spots
Your humble correspondent basically doesn't know anything about anything
I’m going to level with you here. I like reading. I like art. A good book or a ramble through a museum elevates my soul to a place I can’t otherwise get. And I think I’m a decent reader. I’m sensitive to what the writer is doing; I think critically; I have a pretty firm grasp on historical context. But all that said, I have some blind spots.
By blind spot I don’t mean not having read a major book. Someone once told me that in Ernest Hemingway’s estate, his copy of Joyce’s Ulysses was found with its pages uncut after the first few chapters. That is something else. Though I have finished Ulysses, I haven’t made it through Gravity’s Rainbow (yet), even though I like Pynchon. (Can I say I like Pynchon without finishing Gravity’s Rainbow?) However, if I had never read any Joyce (or Pynchon or any other major author), I think we could call that a blind spot.
Here’s one: Henry James. I know he wrote Portrait of a Lady and The Turn of the Screw (I say as I google these to make sure he wrote them). I might’ve read an excerpt from one in an anthology. And I have some vague ideas attached to the man: something to do with Boston, an interest in the paranormal (parlor seances and automatic writing), and some sort of dramatic change in his style over his career. I can even call to mind a couple anecdotes. One, that he revised much of his earlier work in his later style for collections or reissues. Two, that when he was dying, his ramblings were said to be identifiable not just James in style but late James. That second one comes from Oliver Sacks I’m sure. But if the firing squad comes and puts me up against the wall and says tell us what Portrait of a Lady has to say about the social milleiu of turn of the century America or some such nonsense, well then I’ll be toast. Then beyond your single authors, there are entire literary movements of which I live in relative ingnorance.
Victorian Literature. My goodness, what can I say. I’ve read Wuthering Heights. In fact, shamefully, I took a class called Victorian Literature during a semester abroad in Dublin and wrote an essay on it. It must have been the only assigned book I read. What can I say for myself except that there were more pressing matters, namely taking a pint of porter in every pub from the Liberties to College Green AND conducting a highly scientific study of the most vile establishments therein (for they had the cheapest pints.) So through that lapse and many more that followed I live somewhat intellectually impovershed — like a Dickens waif — of Dickens and George Eliot and Thomas Hardy and the Brontes and Jane Austen, who I will clumsily lump in here. I have made my forays — Pride and Prejudice is sitting on my nightstand with a bookmark twenty pages in (what is that Darcy up to?) — but in the map of literature I’m etching into the near side of my skull, the Victorian era remains an empty space inscribed “here be monsters.”
I can say the same for the Russians. I cannot count how many false starts I’ve made on Crime and Punishment. For some reason I always break it out in the dog days of summer, maybe because my copy is a badly beaten mass market paperback, and I don’t mind bringing it to the pool or the beach. I made a good run at Anna Karenina. I even read Nabokov’s lecture on the latter. But I always end up spinning my wheels. I think it was Hemingway (him again) who said that the Russians are really very good, but it’s a shame they couldn’t write. Personally, I cannot second the notion in good faith, but I also can’t help but think of it while I trudge through Raskolnikov’s hysterics.
Outside of literature, in the field of just about everything else — what we might call bar trivia — I have plenty more blind spots. I won’t bore you with a comprehensive list. But please don’t ask me any questions about the rivers of Europe, or state capitals, or national capitals for that matter, or taxonomy, or muscial theater, or opera, or the golden age of Hollywood (I have a terrible affliction where I can’t remember the names of Clark Gable, Gregory Peck, and that other fellow1 at the same time), or those logic games on the LSATs, or 90s pop music, or sitcoms, or financial modelling.
All this is a good bit of catharsis. I do not mean to say that I am proud of my ignorance that I’m bandying about here. On the contrary. When you have a blind spot you know about, it’s a little like not knowing how to ride a bike as an adult. You get to be self-conscious and a little ashamed. You say to yourself, sure I could figure it out, I just haven’t put in the time. Yet there’s always that little suspicion — what if you can’t?
Let the record show that I do know how to ride a bike. And I am sure that one of these days I will pick up Middlemarch or Benjamin Graham’s Intelligent Investor or a map of Europe for Christ’s sake and not put it down until I’ve got it pat. And I will keep filling in the vast empty regions of the map in my head. And surely as I do so more empty regions will appear, small ones in the big ones, and new ones that I didn’t even know about (these are the true blind spots!).
But I also know that the process of learning over a lifetime is more than crossing out the unknowns. In fact, I would propose that there is more spiritual bounty to be found by dipping back into the things you think you already know. Reread that book. Hike that mountain again — the same trail. See how much it has changed since you were last there. See how much you have changed! For every time you return, you bring the past with you, and the past is ever growing. Some day down the road I will finish Anna Karenina and read something from Charles Dickens that isn’t A Christmas Carol. But if someone gives you even money that I read Moby-Dick for the fourth time before then, you know how to bet.
Cary Grant!