A doctorate in the humanities involves learning as much as possible about a limited subject and being able to demonstrate that you know it intimately. Interestingly, unless you continue the rest of your life in that vein, you’ll realize that you know things only in bits. Let me use some personal examples, since they’re the kind I know best. One of my favorite musical artists is Alice Cooper. To this day he’s the only secular rock act I’ve seen in concert. I thought I knew Alice, but Spotify taught me that I knew only a very small bit of his oeuvre. My sense of him as favorite was based on a fragment of what he’s done. The same applies to fictional characters. I was a young fan of Barnabas Collins without having watched nearly all Dark Shadows episodes (and neither of the two series related movies), and having read only a handful of the novelizations. Still, I felt I knew Barnabas. I suspect I could go the rest of the way through the alphabet with no difficulty.
As facetious as it may be, the “million hour rule” has a grain of truth in it. That axiom states that to be a true expert in something you have to spend a million hours doing it. Simple mathematics reveals that means well over a century doing nothing but one thing would be required to fulfill the time. In other words, no-one is a true master of anything. We’re all practitioners. I feel a little better about my recognition that my knowledge, such as it is, is based on small pieces. What I write in my books are simply entries into conversations started by others. This is true even if they remain unread.
I’m always encouraged by the neophyte that sets the experts back on their heels. It’s beautiful to watch knowledge progress that way. Our institutions are important, but they all become prisons when we suppose they represent the only way to do it. Life has so many fascinating elements that the truly curious can’t possibly be an expert in them all. The big picture benefits from stepping back once in a while and considering the small bits that make up the whole. I can’t claim to be an expert on this, and my knowledge—such as it is—only comes in small bits. But small bits, when there are enough of them, add up. The whole picture, however, will never be completed by those of us with only small bits of it.
