Curiosity

As you know, I'm working on putting together a chapbook out of some old poems from my thesis. Most recently, I've been grappling with a poem about Greek water clocks. It's a topic that I find complex and strange and absolutely fascinating, but I know that most people have no idea what a clepsydra is and, to be honest, they don't give a damn.

And that's perfectly fine. The problem is that this poem is dependent upon a knowledgeable audience or, even better, an audience willing to hit up Wikipedia when confusion strikes. It's also a poem that draws my attention to my own knowledge, to my own academic backgrounds. It makes me hyper-aware that I've spent more of my life learning about Greek history and literature than most people care to, and yet I still know so little about it. It's a topic that sounds very learned and obscure, but really I'm only scraping the surface of a whole fascinating field of study that some scholars of Greek archaeology have dedicated their lives to. I'm an amateur at best.

This makes me think about my other areas of "expertise": poetry, American literature, personal essays, baking, etc. But what I know about, say, poetry is just a smattering in a huge field that's bursting with poets and poems I've never heard of. I can name at least twenty people I know personally who know a heck of a lot more about poetry than I do. I know that, even in this, my primary field of expertise, it's absolutely impossible to know everything, and it's nearly impossible to gain mastery over even a fragment of such a wide field. For example, it would take a lifetime of study and reading and thinking to master a tiny category like Post-Modernist Midwestern American Poetry By Women written after 1960.

Sometimes, I find my persistent and unavoidable ignorance to be depressing, but more often I find it thrilling and even comforting. A friend once told me that libraries make her sad because she walks into the stacks and knows that she will never be able to read all the books that she sees. But this is the exact reason that libraries make me so happy: no matter how hard I work to learn, there will always be too much to know in my lifetime, and there will always be some work left for someone else to do.

There is a limit to what one man or woman can know. In a library full of hundreds of packed shelves and millions of volumes, each of us can only read a few shelves worth in a lifetime. No matter how boundless our curiosity is, the world is always much vaster and much greater than our aspirations, and this, I know, is a gift.