Finally, a note to those (mercifully few) readers who wrote to us complaining that the first edition of An Incomplete Education failed, despite their high hopes and urgent needs, to complete their educations: Don’t hold your breath this time around, either. We’ll refrain from referring you, snidely, to the book’s title (but for goodness’ sake, don’t you even look before you march off to the cash register?), but we will permit ourselves to wonder what a “complete” education might consist of, and why, if such a thing existed, you would want it anyway. What, know it all? No gaps to fill, no new territory to explore, nothing left to learn, education over? (And no need for third and fourth revised editions of this book?) Please, write to us again and tell us you were just kidding.
INTRODUCTION TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION, MARCH 1986
It’s like this: You’re reading the Sunday book section and there, in a review of a book that isn’t even about physics but about how to write a screenplay, you’re confronted by that word again: quark. You have been confronted by it at least twenty-five times, beginning in at least 1978, but you have not managed to retain the definition (something about building blocks), and the resonances (something about threesomes, something about birdshit) are even more of a problem. You’re feeling stymied. You worry that you may not use spare time to maximum advantage, that the world is passing you by, that maybe it would make sense to subscribe to a third newsweekly. Your coffee’s getting cold. The phone rings. You can’t bring yourself to answer it.
Or it’s like this: You do know what a quark is. You can answer the phone. It is an attractive person you have recently met. How are you? How are you? The person is calling to wonder if you feel like seeing a movie both of you missed the first time around. It’s The Year of Living Dangerously, with Mel Gibson and that very tall actress. Also, that very short actress. “Plus,” the person says, “it’s set in Indonesia, which, next to India, is probably the most fascinating of all Third World nations. It’s like the political scientists say, ‘The labyrinth that is India, the mosaic that is Indonesia.’ Right?” Silence at your end of the phone. Clearly this person is into overkill, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to say something back. India you could field. But Indonesia? Fortunately, you have cable—and a Stouffer’s lasagna in the freezer.
Or it’s like this: You know what a quark is. Also something about Indonesia. The two of you enjoy the movie. The new person agrees to go with you to a dinner party one of your best friends is giving at her country place. You arrive, pulling into a driveway full of BMWs. You go inside. Introductions are made. Along about the second margarita, the talk turns to World War II. Specifically, the causes of World War II. More specifically, Hitler. Already this is not easy. But it is interesting. “Well,” says another guest, flicking an imaginary piece of lint from the sleeve of a double-breasted navy blazer, “you really can’t disregard the impact Nietzsche had, not only on Hitler, but on a prostrate Germany. You know: The will to power. The Übermensch. The transvaluation of values. Don’t you agree, old bean?” Fortunately, you have cable—and a Stouffer’s lasagna in the freezer.
So what’s your problem? Weren’t you supposed to have learned all this stuff back in college? Sure you were, but then, as now, you had your good days and your bad days. Ditto your teachers. Maybe you were in the infirmary with the flu the week your Philosophy 101 class was slogging through Zarathustra. Maybe your poli-sci prof was served with divorce papers right about the time the class hit the nonaligned nations. Maybe you failed to see the relevance of subatomic particles given your desperate need to get a date for Homecoming. Maybe you actually had all the answers—for a few glorious hours before the No-Doz (or whatever it was) wore off. No matter. The upshot is that you’ve got some serious educational gaps. And that, old bean, is what this book is all about.
Now we’ll grant you that educational gaps today don’t signify in quite the way they did even ten years ago. In fact, when we first got the idea for this book, sitting around Esquire magazine’s research department, we envisioned a kind of intellectual Dress for Success, a guidebook to help reasonably literate, reasonably ambitious types like ourselves preserve an upwardly mobile image and make an impression at cocktail parties by getting off a few good quotes from Dr. Johnson—or, for that matter, by not referring to Evelyn Waugh as “she.”
Yup, times have changed since then. (You didn’t think we were still sitting around the Esquire research department, did you?) And the more we heard people’s party conversation turning from literary matters to money-market accounts and condo closings, the more we worried that the book we were working on wasn’t noble (or uplifting, or profound; also long) enough. Is it just another of those bluffers’ handbooks? we wondered. Is its guiding spirit not insight at all, but rather the brashest kind of one-upmanship? Is trying to reduce the complexities of culture, politics, and science to a couple hundred words each so very different from trying to fill in all the wedges of one’s pie in a game of Trivial Pursuit? (And why hadn’t we thought up Trivial Pursuit? But that’s another story.)
Then we realized something. We realized that what we were really going for here had less to do with competition and power positions than with context and perspective. In a world of bits and bytes, of reruns and fast forwards, of information overloads and significance shortfalls (and of Donald Trump and bagpersons no older than one is, but that’s another story) it feels good to be grounded. It feels good to be able to bring to the wire-service story about Reagan’s dream of packing the Supreme Court a sense of what the Supreme Court is (and the knowledge that people have been trying to pack it from the day it opened), to be able to buttress one’s comparison of Steven Spielberg and D. W. Griffith with a knowledge of the going critical line on the latter. In short, we found that we were casting our vote for grounding, as opposed to grooming. Also that grounding, not endless, mindless mobility, turns out to be the real power position.
And then something really strange happened. Setting out to discover what conceivable appeal a Verdi, say, could have on a planet that was clearly—and, it seemed at the time, rightly—dominated by the Rolling Stones, we stumbled into a nineteenth-century landscape where the name of the game was grandeur, not grandiosity; where romanticism had no trashy connotations; where music and spectacle could elicit overwhelming emotions without, at the same time, threatening to fry one’s brains. No kidding, we actually liked this stuff! What’s more, coming of age in a world of T-shirts and jeans and groovy R & B riffs apparently didn’t make one ineligible for a passport to the other place. One just needed a few key pieces of information and a willingness to travel.
And speaking of travel, let’s face it: Bumping along over the potholes of your mind day after day can’t be doing much for your self-esteem. Which is the third thing, along with power and enrichment, this book is all about. Don’t you think you’ll feel better about yourself once all those gaps have been filled? Everything from the mortifying (how to tell Keats from Shelley) to the merely pesky (how to tell a nave from a narthex)? Imagine. Nothing but you and the open road.
Before you take off, though, we ought to say something about the book’s structure. Basically, it’s divided into chapters corresponding to the disciplines and departments you remember from college (you were paying that much attention, weren’t you?). Not that everything in the book is stuff you’d necessarily study in college, but it’s all well within the limits of what an “educated” person is expected to know. In those areas where our own roads weren’t in such great repair, we’ve called on specialist friends and colleagues to help us out. Even so, we don’t claim to have covered everything; we simply went after what struck us as the biggest trouble spots.