Tonight I’m drinking chocolate milk from the local dairy straight out of the bottle. (From a chocolate cow? Near a chocolate stream?) I was listening to Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 and when that ended I switched to Third Stream Music by the Modern Jazz Quartet. I know it sounds really pretentious, but that’s mitigated by the fact that I don’t know much about either.
“Surface level” is my whole thing. I like a lot of things and know just a little bit about them. My internal store of information is miles wide and an inch deep.
In one of the Foundation books by Isaac Asimov there’s a character — I think it’s the Mule — who can make intuitive leaps on small amounts of information with a high degree of accuracy. I’ve always thought that was the way my brain works best. Take a little bit of reading here, a dash of overheard conversation there, maybe a glimpsed movie poster or TV ad, and suddenly I’m in a conversation with someone who mentions a thing I don’t really know about but can carry on a conversation about. If we get in too deep I’ll eventually have to admit I don’t know much or else change the subject. But for a few minutes I can slide over the surface of the conversation as if my tiny chunk of knowledge was the tip, not the whole iceberg.
This kind of brain function lends itself to brief but passionate dives in a variety of topics. I’ll get into a band and listen to nothing else for weeks. I’ll read a book and devour more by the author or in the genre. I’ll take up the ukulele or the slingshot or whittling or the bow and arrow. While I’m in the middle of whatever the topic is, I’m consumed by it. And then … it’s over. It might be weeks or years until I think of it again. Maybe I’ll never go back to it. But a little bit of what I learned sticks around. At this point, 48 years into this method, all those little bits amount to quite a lot. Not a useful lot, but a lot nonetheless.
A librarian friend once told me that this is a good kind of brain for a librarian to have. I do adore libraries. And I’m glad to live in the age of streaming music and YouTube and Wikipedia rabbit holes. It’s the golden era of momentary obsession.
Comments