Photo by Alfons Morales on Unsplash
There’s more value in the books you haven’t read than in the ones you have, or so Nassim Taleb tells us about Umberto Eco’s anti-library: despite having over thirty thousand books in his personal library, he is prouder of the ones he hasn’t read than the ones he has. This attitude should extend to one’s own knowledge, and to what we know and don’t know about our own worlds and the wider one.
It’s an attitude to life that protects against the Dunning-Kruger effect – the phenomenon that the less you know about a topic, the more you think you know about it, and vice-versa, by virtue of your own ignorance of the depth of the subject.
Gather as many books in your library as you can afford, Taleb instructs us, and let it serve as a reminder of how little you know. If less people were so arrogant about their knowledge and what they know – which by definition gives away all that they don’t know about a topic – the world might be better off.
“Judge a man not by what he reads, but what he doesn’t read”, as Taleb himself would further say.
So it is with many things.
Eco’s library shows off what he hasn’t gotten around to reading, so he can have no pretensions that he knows everything.
It’s the attitude of holding your hands up and admitting you know nothing.
It also inspires a yearning for more the as-yet-or-maybe-forever unattainable.
The more I’ve travelled the less I feel like I’ve travelled, and the longer my list of destinations grows.
On a creative level, I’ve yet to understand or face writer’s block, because the more I’ve written over the last few years the more inspiration and ideas I’ve gotten for further writing. Difficulties in the writing process, yes, but not in the ideas themselves. I’ve only scratched the surface of the last few years of my life, for example, and the more I revisit certain times and places and experiences the more I feel I have to offer on the subjects.
The better you get at capturing ideas from thin air the better you get at capturing ideas.
The better you get at football the more you want to play.
So it goes.
The yearning of wanting to cover every last square mile of the map is a difficult one too. Best not to get too upset or definitive with a list of travel destinations, and may anyone who’s ever contributed to or recommended an article entitled anything like “Top 10 places to visit before you DIE” go and just tick off their own list before dying themselves. Such a terrible mindset to pressure people into, to complete everything in life and be satisfied with it.
The arrogance of thinking you know everything is inspired by the arrogance of thinking you do know everything.
The more you know, the more you know you don’t know, and if your blood is genuinely curious rather than of the box-ticking and poseuring variety, your library and your lists will continue to grow and grow and grow. And the larger it grows, the more humbled you’ll be by your lack of knowledge.
Maybe that’s why a friend told me once a few years ago that she wanted to just call off the travel and the dating and the inextricable process of finding herself and go home and settle down to have kids like her siblings; before the experiences in dating and travelling and life accumulated to too much and she’d gone past the point of ever being satisfied with what she had. She saw the dangers in driving yourself to always wanting more.
Such is the life of curiosity.
In any case, it’s not really about that. It’s more about the humility.
For every destination visited, know that you have not travelled much at all. This knowledge may be thrust in your face just by viewing a simple map of the place you’re in – you’ll never visit all of even that one.
Try a map of your home town or county and try to ‘tick off’ everywhere on it. I haven’t even scratched the surface yet. There’s more to be learned about yourself the more you scratch closer to home.
And as for my writing lists: for every five articles or stories I begin, only one gets finished; for every one I publish at least another three ideas come to mind. I will never write the perfect article or capture all my ideas in one succinct place.
There are eight books lying on the shelf beside my bed since Christmas, with another twenty downloaded for my e-reader.
The feeling: “I know nothing.”
Even beautiful curses take some acceptance to live with.
May your lists keep on growing.