When I was a very little child someone bought for me a book. It lived at my grandparents’ house; I browsed through it whenever I visited. I remember it was a fat, large-size paperback, with cheap pages. I do not remember its name, but I think of it as the Big Book About Everything. That may as well have been its title. I would pay a lot of money, I think, to get a copy of that book for my children today. It was divided into sections — one was about animals, one about the human body, and there were several others. Each page had a question at the top, and the text below was an answer, illustrated with cartoons. Who invented the toothbrush? What is the fastest animal? What is a tsunami? Why do tennis players say “love” instead of zero? I read that book voraciously, and learned a few interesting facts about a great many things. (To the annoyance of my teachers, I’m sure, because I couldn’t help showing off, either.)
I loved, even then, knowing something about everything.
In high school I specialized a bit and among my classes I loved geometry, physics and chemistry, which anyway are just another way of knowing something about everything, because what subject is there that isn’t informed by geometry, physics, and chemistry? (I also loved my foreign language classes, which at least gave me another way to talk about everything). I went on to study engineering in college, and there discovered that I also loved the rest of mathematics. Another way to talk about everything. I loved becoming fluent in that system.
So then I went on to graduate school, where one tries to learn everything about something. And I kind of fell flat there. Oh, I finished all right, with a lot of prodding and help and a last-minute patch created by having someone else actually go about solving the halfway-decent, reasonably mathematically elegant, possibly useful, theoretical problem I’d posed. But by the end of it, I hated the something I was learning everything about. Just couldn’t stand to think about it anymore.
I was about three years into graduate school — I had just passed my oral examination — when I recognized that I did not like knowing everything about something, and that I preferred to know something about everything. I repressed this, because it seemed like a shameful perversion of the intellect. I thought that the thing to be, if you wanted to do something worthwhile, was an expert. The field doesn’t matter; it could be polymer science or it could be finish carpentry; but one had to be capable of learning everything about something. Loving to learn something about everything instead — well, that made a person shallow. And so I slogged unhappily along in the narrow, high-walled channel I’d sluiced myself into.
And then… I dropped out (well, that’s how I think of it; actually I graduated and didn’t look for a job) and the vista opened back out into a wide delta. I had a four-year-old child. All of a sudden, my old love for knowing something about everything has blossomed into something wonderfully useful. Some children like to know everything about something, and some children like to know something about everything, and many children like both; but the business of early learning is, of course, to gather information about the whole world, a vocabulary and grammar of experience, and tales of things that happen in far-off lands that they cannot experience immediately. So taking their hands and showing them something about everything has suddenly become my job. And there is of course the possibility that they can know something that’s totally new to me — for someone as “shallow” as I am, heh, this is great fun. I get to dip into something brand-new, as deep as I want to go, learning together with a seven-year-old, a four-year-old; and then move on to something else.
I no longer think there is anything shameful about being a “generalist.” Something about everything is indeed a worthy goal, especially if you remember that you can always dog-ear the page and come back to dip in further if you need to. I even know a little bit about what it’s like to know everything about something, so perhaps those years in the channel weren’t entirely ill-spent.
Today: Understood Betsy, a lovely children’s book I’m reading for the first time; mineralogy, a subject I took a college class in once; planning a weekend picnic to see igneous rocks; practice typing; Latin and Spanish, languages that are new to me; the sound /j/ spelled with the letter j; the concept of geometrical symmetry, explored with pattern blocks; subtracting nine from the integers between nine and twenty, inclusive; the Gospel of Matthew; how to make egg salad; and Jan Vermeer’s painting Woman Holding a Balance.
I’m astonished to find that I’m finally in my element — or rather, in my elements. And it feels natural and good, and also — fun.
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