The difficulty, of course — as you probably knew before you enrolled at St John’s but were no doubt reminded of during your freshman orientation here and every semester thereafter — is succinctly put in the title of Isaac Babel’s earliest known work of fiction: You Must Know Everything. What a title: You Must Know Everything! That imperative implies, among much else, that you must read everything; must indeed have read everything, which of course you cannot; which you could not even if history refrained from growing both longer (as recorded time accumulates) and wider (as cultures evolve and intercultural connections multiply), thus ever enlarging the mass of what Umberto Eco calls “the already said.” You cannot read everything; could not even if you were a certain fellow Hopkins graduate student who seemed to me and his other seminar-mates to have read nearly everything already; whom we suspected of staying up all night reading the corpus’s few remaining unread volumes (in their original languages) while we lesser beings slept; and who I later learned was, in fact, doing just that, more or less, he being not only a polymath but a tireless insomniac: a charming and generous fellow of such cripplingly vast erudition that to this day he is scarcely able to complete a sentence or publish an essay, because every word he utters sets off so many synaptic hot-links in his mind that he has difficulty getting from subject to verb to object, astray in the hypertextuality of his splendid erudition.
Yet even he, as he’d be the first to insist, is far indeed from having read all the books worth reading, much less from having re-read them (we recall Vladimir Nabokov’s insistence that “all great reading is rereading”—a dismaying idea when one has finally reached the end of Dr. Eliot’s shelf or of the ten folio volumes of Somadeva’s Katha Sarit Sagara, or The Ocean of the Streams of Story). No: We cannot read all the books, not to mention spectating all the important stage-plays, films, and graphic and plastic arts; auditing all the music; acquiring a working knowledge of all the languages and arts and sciences (a fascinating section of our Hopkins commencement program is the pages and pages of doctoral-dissertation titles in the several sciences: titles of which, more often than not, I cannot understand a single word; can only shake my head in awe at the staggering multifariousness of human intellectual curiosity)…. We “must know everything,” but we cannot, and inasmuch as we cannot, our pursuit of Higher Education both during and after our college years involves us in an exemplary paradox: Since time, attention, energy, and opportunity are all finite, we must radically exclude and delimit if we are to learn anything at all well; yet in so doing we may very possibly leave out things that, had we discovered them or they us, might have been keys to the treasure that we were scarcely aware we were seeking; or if not the keys, at least elements of the combination.
The Tragic View of life, and/or of history, is that there are no ultimate victories, just different ways to lose, the only “victory” being to go down heroically, or anyhow as nobly as we can. The Tragic View of liberal education is that even at its best, as at St. John’s, it is so necessarily, unavoidably limited that all it can attempt is to afford us some experience of, for example, informed close reading and critical thinking, and to make us aware that there remain continents of knowledge out there that one lifetime could scarcely scratch the surface of, even were we to devote it all to reading and studying — which we must not, since education comes so much from hands-on doing and experiencing as well as from reading and study. Our Hopkins mini-version of your Great Books curriculum was commendable; but how fortunate for me that to make ends meet I worked as a book-filer in the university library, where I lost myself back in the stacks sampling what I was supposed to be reshelving, and thus discovered such extracurricular storytellers as Petronius and Boccaccio and Scheherazade, important to my eventual vocation. But who knows what-all I didn’t happen to discover, or do or meet, that might have made me into a very different, not impossibly a quite better, writer, not to mention a better human being?
BUT THAT WAY lies fruitless discontent, and I do not at all intend the Tragic View of Liberal Education as a despairing or even a pessimistic view, only an unblinkered one. I remember wishing, as a green undergraduate and apprentice writer, that I could at least know the names of everything, if not the things themselves: “all trades,” as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it, “their gear, tackle, and trim”: every rock, bug, plant, star, body-bone, lingo, culture. I remember feeling like a newcomer to a party that had been going on for millennia, and worrying that maybe all the best jokes and stories had been told already. 25 centuriesworth of poets getting off good metaphors for the ocean and the sunrise, for example, since Homer’s “wine-dark sea” and “rosy-fingered dawn”: Could I or anybody hope to come up with yet another? And how would I know that I had, unless I reconnoitered the entire existing inventory? Which of course I could not; only comfort myself with the speculation that my tens of thousands of predecessors, so far from exhausting the stock of good dawn- and sea-images, might for all we know have scarcely made a dent in it. No doubt the number of possible zingers is finite, but then so is the number of stars in the galaxy, not to mention in the universe: finite, but astronomically large.
Therefore take heart, adviseth the Tragic View: One’s education is at best fragmentary, and will never be anything like complete; but at least it can know itself to be so, and can achieve some compass and coherence. It has to start somewhere, and inasmuch as we happen to dwell in this historical/cultural latitude and longitude rather than some other, it seems not unreasonable to begin (although we will not end) with some judiciously chosen reading-list therefrom — recognizing it to be neither more nor less than our point of departure (or 88 or 418 points of departure), not our journey’s end.
Will there be objections to the list? Of course there’ll be, and welcome to the Great Conversation! Are there arguable alternatives to the Tragic View of Liberal Education? No doubt there are — including the Tragic View of the Tragic View. But that’s a sermon for some other occasion than this: For now, my warm congratulations indeed on your Education Thus Far. Welcome to the party! Gaudeamus igitur! On with your stories!
The Relevance of Irrelevance: Writing American
This article — commissioned by the State Department in 2002 for inclusion in a book of essays to be distributed in U.S. embassies and consulates throughout the world “to illustrate American values through having various authors consider what makes them an American writer,” but subsequently rejected for its “explicit commentary on the events of September 11”—first appeared in Italian translation1 in the anthology Undici settembre (Torino: Einaudi, 2003).
SPEAKING AT JOHNS Hopkins University back when his country was riven by Apartheid, the eminent South African novelist J. M. Coetzee remarked that under such sorry historical circumstances, for him to publish a novel that made no political statement would be tantamount to his making a very conspicuous — and egregious — political statement. From my seat in the audience I nodded sympathetic assent, although Coetzee’s observation was by no means a pitch for sympathy. And, not for the first time, I silently thanked Apollo and all the Muses for affording me the luxury of political irrelevance.