Blog

Jon Ferguson

Once upon a time, like in 1967, there was a boy who decided he wanted to be as educated as possible. He went to the most educated people he knew, and asked, “Mom and Dad, how can I be the most-educated, well-informed person in the world?” His mother told him to read, read, and read and his father said he should think about what he read and try to sift through it all and look for truth. He also said, “Son, listen to the world’s greatest thinkers.” When the boy asked him who they were, his father said that was for him to find out.

The boy went to the big city library and checked out ten books on history (You were only allowed to take out ten at a time). He read them all and learned things about Neanderthal people, the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the exploration of the Americas, the rise of democracy and capitalism, communism, the world’s worst wars , and a little about the history of China (he took out a book on China remembering that his 8^th and 9^th grade history teachers hadn’t said much about it). He took the books back and realized he hadn’t touched the surface of anything. Nonetheless, he took out ten more books – thicker this time with fewer pictures – on history and found out some specifics like how many people died on the Russian front in World War II, why Hitler invaded Poland, how the Roman empire fell, where Magellan died, how the French Revolution influenced the American Revolution and vice versa, how Julius Caesar helped Cleopatra retake the throne after her brothers drove her out of Egypt, how long it took for Christianity to spread, and why Japan entered World War II.

This kind of thing repeated itself for a few years. When the boy wasn’t reading, he was watching documentary films about history, nature, politics, philosophy, religion, and science. At age seventeen he began the university. He changed his major three times and finally got a double degree in biology and geography. He was fascinated by all life all over the world. He minored in history and psychology.

After the university he traveled abroad for two years in Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal. Everywhere he went he tried to talk to the local people and understand how they differed from people back home in America. He read Flaubert, Balzac, Cervantes, Garcia Lorca, Dante, Calvino, and everything he could find by Pessoa. He also went to museums and galleries everywhere, looking closely at both old and modern paintings and objects.

The boy was now a man and he could talk to pretty much anybody about anything. He did not consider himself well-educated yet by any stretch of the imagination. He knew there were millions of books he hadn’t read, and billions of subjects about which he knew nothing.

One spring day, on the beach in Albufeira he started questioning his whole idea of knowledge. “Reading history is not knowing what actually happened in the real minds of real people. It is all a gross simplification of infinitely complex events,” he thought as he looked at the white surf embracing the shore. But that didn’t keep him from reading. When he went back home his father gave him all twenty-three volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. That was 23,000 pages to read. Given that he had taken a job stocking shelves in the local supermarket (“Safeway” it was called) and was working eight hours six days a week (he volunteered for the extra hours when people called in sick), it took him a full year of his life to get to the last entry, “Zygote, the biological term for the fertilized egg or ovum. (See FERTILIZAZION; EMBRYOLOGY).” He was now twenty-five and he could feel the years beginning to shoot by. While he had read the twenty-three volumes of the Britannica, the only other things he picked up were newspapers, the Oakland Tribune that his mother read, and the Sunday edition of the New York Times that his father received in the mail a week late. The Oakland Tribune was in the mailbox every afternoon by four.

The man (let’s call him “Plato” from now on) began to intensely feel  trapped, i.e. while he was reading one thing, he could not be reading another. Had he wasted a year of his intellectual life on the encyclopedia? Should he have been reading Shakespeare (he had only read “Macbeth”)? Steinbeck (only the pages of “Of Mice and Men” and “The Grapes of Wrath” had passed before his eyes)? Hemingway (just “The Old Man and the Sea”)? Freud (he had leafed though the book on dreams)? Sartre (he had read “Nausea”, but not the thicker, more philosophical work, “Being and Nothingness”…but wasn’t Sartre starting to go out of style?)? Heidegger (he had suffered through half of “Being and Time” while sitting in on Hubert Dreyfus’s lectures at Cal Berkeley)? Sometimes he felt guilty because he had read so few female authors and he thought he should be attacking the Bronte sisters, Virginia Wolff, Jane Austen, Toni Morrison, and the life of Marie Curie. There were other moments when he felt touches of remorse for having only skimmed through the Bible, Quran, Upanishads,Tripitakas, Guru Granth Sahib, the Book of Mormon, the works of Lao Tzu, Mary Baker Eddy’s “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures”, etc. and never thoroughly engrossing himself in any of them. He had read parts all these so-called “sacred works”, but he just couldn’t get himself to dive headfirst into any of them. “Am I being unfair to ‘religion’?” Plato asked himself on more than one occasion. But there were so many of them! How could one be fair to all of them…?

And there was another problem. Plato could only read fluently in English. His Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese were good enough to get by in hotels and restaurants, but not to read any of the hundreds of thousands of books that existed in those languages, not to speak of German,  Flemish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Russian, Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek Chinese, Japanese, Arab, Swahili, and the other hundreds of languages books exist in and of which he didn’t know more than five words.

Plato began to wonder about his education…not only his, but everybody’s. How could one ever be truly educated? There was too much to know…Yes, just too much to learn and know….As he was ruminating about this, he thought back to his moment on the beach in Albufeira a couple years prior. Not only might “history” be an over-simplification, but all learning and thinking might be an over-simplification of…

He remembered that once, when he was in Paris, he met a man in a café on the Boulevard St. Michel who had told him he should stop reading Sartre and start reading Nietzsche. But Plato had balked at the idea because he had heard bad things about the German with the thick moustache. The man had said he thought Nietzsche was the greatest thinker ever. Plato had thought such a statement to be nonsense. But now, in his despair, he decided maybe he should give Nietzsche a try.

It was tough going at first. “The Birth of Tragedy”…  “Human, All Too Human”… “Daybreak… “The Gay Science”… “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”… But Plato stuck with him, for more than a year. He was almost thirty now and was still working in the supermarket. But he had stopped working over-time and even called in sick once in a while so he could read…Nietzsche.

Three years later he had finished everything. Every book beat his brain harder than the one before…“Beyond Good and Evil”…“On the Geneology of Morals”…“Twilight of the Idols”…”The Anti-Christ”… and finally his so-called autobiography, “Ecce Homo”.  The last paragraph left him numb:

“I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous — a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.”

What had Nietzsche said? What had all this meant? Had everything Plato had believed in and hallowed heretofore exploded? Was the idea of being an educated man” a farcical illusion? Could no human being claim to know the world, know truth, know reality? Was “truth” not possible for we human types? If truth was out of the question, how could any man or woman claim to be educated? Not only was there far far too much to read and “know”, but the idea of “knowing” itself had become a chimera.

Plato saw two possibilities. He could become a specialist in something. He would give up the idea of being erudite and become a world specialist in one thing. He would learn absolutely everything there is to learn about one subject. He would have something he could hold on to, something he knew more about than anybody else, some kingdom in which he was king!

He could become a brain surgeon. It was not too late. He was thirty-two. Or maybe he could become an agronomist. He had a degree in biology. He could do a doctorate and become a world expert in soybean production. Weren’t soybeans the protein source of the future for mankind? … He could do a PhD in art history and become a world expert on Botticelli. After going to the Uffizi and seeing “Venus” hadn’t he gone back to his hotel room and masturbated? Hadn’t she been the most sensual thing he had ever seen in his life? … He could become a world famous food expert. He had been stocking food for more than five years. He loved food. He knew food. He could become the best cooking critic on earth. He could start a new guidebook to compete with Michelin and Gault-Millau… But no, he didn’t want to do that!  Ah yes! He could become an opera critic! He had been to the Fenice and seen “La Traviata”. It had given him goose bumps over and over. He could spend his life in opera! Opera! Opera! Opera forever! …But no. No. A hundred times no. He knew himself. He knew he didn’t want to do any one thing for the rest of his life! The idea made him shiver. His mind went in too many directions for such a thing. He could never be a world specialist.

His other possibility was quit his job and take a year off to travel. Maybe he would meet someone and fall in love. This time he would go to the orient…to Thailand…or maybe Bali. Who knows, maybe he would stay there and live a simple life on the beach selling sandwiches and beer. He would meet a woman who loved giving massages. They would have two children. A boy! And a girl! And they would….

Plato stared at the wall in front of him. He only knew one thing for sure: he was still alive. And being alive, he had to do something. But, really, what did it mean, “to be alive”? Yes, he would ask his mother and father…

Unfortunately, they were now both dead.