Everything I Read or Write or Hear Slips Through My Fingers
I neither know nor think that I know
Image: In shades of purple and bright yellow, this painting shows us a corner of a grand room. As a curtain billows, sunlight falls on an indistinct framed photograph leaning against the ornate wall. To the left is a doorway, through which we may glimpse the well-lit room beyond.
I
Once upon a time, I read a book. It wasn’t long, or particularly difficult. In fact, I rather enjoyed it. But the next day, when someone asked me what it was about, everything evaporated—the arguments, the chapters, even the broad themes. It was like I had never read it. It’s still on a shelf in my room, mocking me.
Reading feels like grabbing words with some powerful magic, holding them to myself for one brief moment when the whole is made clearer. Then I exhale out the ideas, the concepts. Soon everything is gone. All I have left are formless puddles of cool water after the ice has melted. I know nothing. I can’t imagine how that gave Socrates any joy.
No matter how much I read, there’s nothing behind me, under me. I’m standing on quicksand. I’m standing in a bog. Everything I read or write or hear slips through my fingers. The most I can do is write a reading response, which at least records the moment of meeting the idea. I don’t know how much I know, and I don’t know how much I don’t know. If I descend into the slumbering vaults of my mind, will I see only dust and empty chambers?
I wonder, did I really forget the contents of that book? Or did I absorb what it said but forgot that I had learned it? Perhaps it was a bit of both.
II
You're a beach. The beach is, well, a beach. Mostly sand, but sand is good. Waves come in and go, stirring sand and water, bringing foam and shells and little black fishes that swim away. Tides rise and fall.
Over hundreds and thousands of breaking waves, the beach collects shells. The very shape of the beach changes, but at such a slow scale you cannot notice it happening. Dig a hole and ten minutes later it is evened out, indistinguishable from the gently patterned wet sand all around.
So that is what it is.
Sometimes you learn something, and the waves take it away. But sooner or later, surer than the tides, your beach will accumulate shells. You may not believe me now, but there will come a day when you remember more than you forget.
And other times, you go out looking for wisdom and it gets incorporated into who you are, your perspective, your history, so you cannot see the things you've learned as ‘things you've learned’. They're just things you always knew.
I remember struggling, really struggling with the idea of base and superstructure. When I finally understood, it became a tool I could use. It was no longer new, and so it disappeared into the recesses of my brain. Once you learn something, you cannot hold on to the sensation of having learned something for too long.
Image: Painting by Johanna (based on a photograph in Droit de regards)