I had a very good public school education. I grew up with parents who read all the time. They let me read whatever I wanted. I was reading way WAY above my weight class from a very early age. I “took” to the reading list at school, although of course I didn’t like some of the books. I can see back then that my tendency towards always learning new things was … I don’t even want to say “instilled in me” because I don’t even know if it was that conscious. It just was the way it was.
It may seem that academia or something like that would have been a natural fit. That I would continue that kind of education into college and beyond. But that was not my route. I was a Theatre major, and so my college years were spent taking acting classes, and scenic design and theatre history. I had electives I had to check off, so I took a general science class (anthropology), a couple Math classes (agony. I needed a tutor.) I took a great class called the History of Science, which “counted” as a science class but it was more of an overview of the development of scientific thought. I took a class on the Harlem Renaissance. Many of those writers were already familiar to me, though, because of my very good public school education. One of my electives — and honestly it’s the best class I’ve ever taken, up there with my greatest acting classes – was on the Industrial Revolution.
I absorbed knowledge. And whatever interested me that came into my line of vision, I’d go off on my own and learn all about it. I am the daughter of a librarian. I researched everything. I researched the Actors Studio, all on my own, and practically became an expert by the time I was 16. I got interested in Margaret Atwood when I was around 19, and so I sought out every single critical study about her work. Same with Sylvia Plath. Most of my really intense study was done outside the classroom. Self-directed.
This continues to be the case.
I follow the bread crumbs. And so I got interested in the history of the Balkans. I got interested in Stalin. I got interested in totalitarian governments and mind control. I read the work of Robert Lifton, which led me down a deep rabbit hole into the Korean War. Any dictator in the world I’ve probably read a book about that person. “Okay, gotta tackle Pol Pot now.” This is all on my own.
It’s not that I am not educated. But in a way my education was not at all “formal”. It was high school and then … Intensive focused academic study stopped totally after high school. Acting of course is an intense study, too, and part of the fun of being an actor is doing all the research. So I learned about the Bloomsbury group, I learned about labor strikes in the 1930s, I learned about the Eisenhower era, I learned different accents, I learned about acting techniques through the ages. I learned about Antonin Artaud and Gordon Craig and Peter Brook … all the visionaries.
But I did not study ANY literature in college. None. Zip. Nada. So … if we didn’t cover it in high school, I didn’t read it.
I am STILL “catching up” because of this gap. I missed entire authors, entire genres, entire eras, really – the mid-20th century is a total blank for me, outside of Sylvia Plath. My education was weird and unfinished. I can tell you about Euripedes or Christopher Marlowe or F. Scott Fitzgerald but anything past the 30s is … it might as well not exist. Then I pick up the thread in the 80s, and so I’ve read all of John Irving, Margaret Atwood, Stephen King. But I skipped about 60 years. However, public school gave me a love was what was called “Humanities” back then (I still like that term. We covered all of it. Ancient Egypt. Ancient China. Ancient Greece. The Roman Empire. Corinthian columns. This shit STICKS with you.) Perhaps it’s a good thing I didn’t major in English lit or whatever in college. Post-modern lit-crit is incomprehensible to me. What if I had been forced to write like that? And as Orwell taught us: the words you use are the thoughts you have. If you limit words, you limit thought. The tortuous language of academics is 100% unreadable to me.
Still. I’ve felt insecure sometimes because I haven’t read many of the big-wigs. And so I set out to rectify these gaps. One thing leads to another. I follow the bread crumbs. It’s haphazard. Sometimes I’ll be like, “You know what? I don’t feel like I can fully participate in our culture without having read Philip Roth.” So I started out, blindly. And now I’m hooked. How have I not read him before?There are a couple of authors where I’ve only read one book of theirs, the “big” book, and feel like I need to read more of them. Nabokov is one. George Eliot another. I’ve read plenty of Dickens. I’ve read most of Melville. All of Twain. All of the Bronte’s stuff. I read Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann and swooned over it. I can’t even comprehend how someone could even begin to write a book like that. (This is also the fun of discovering stuff on my own: I don’t have a teacher telling me how to think about it. I go into things open.)
But I never read Doctor Faustus. There’s a chapter devoted to Mann in Clive James’ indispensable Cultural Amnesia, and he references Doctor Faustus throughout the book, since he so often writes about totalitarian tyranny, and societies shuddering under the iron heel of dictators and brainwashed masses. Hmm. Sounds familiar. And Doctor Faustus is all about that. It’s one of those books where I basically know the whole story even though I’ve never read it before. Its reputation precedes it.
Now I can see why.
I can’t even DEAL with this book it’s so thought-provoking. I have to read paragraphs twice because … I’m not educated, lol, and I have to focus really hard to get at what he’s saying.
In an early chapter, Mann (or, the narrator of the book) describes a series of music lectures he attended with Adrian. Mann goes on and on and on, walking you through the lectures. But … I came out of it enriched. I came out of it a little bit smarter. I understood the concepts. I got what he was doing. I felt very proud. Since the narrator and Adrian are teenagers when they attend the lectures – maybe even younger – much of it went over their heads, but it intrigued them, to ask those questions, to talk about the issues, and … the lectures point the way towards further study. It intrigued them enough that they both become obsessed. In other words, they realized how much they didn’t know.
And what an amazing state to be in.
Mann describes it so perfectly – being presented with knowledge before you have the proper context, and the almost helpless feeling you get when you realize how much you don’t know, but also the excitement because now you can go out and learn about it.
This is how I live my life. There is always a state of “anticipatory learning.” I’ve never heard it described so perfectly.
I interrupt my paraphrase here only to point out that the lecturer was speaking about issues, concerns, matters of art that had never entered into our field of vision and only now, by means of his constantly imperiled speech, did they emerge as shadows at its periphery; and to observe that we had no way of verifying what he said other than by means of his own annotated presentations at the piano, which we heard with the dimly excited fantasy of children listening to fairy tales they do not understand, even while their tender minds are nonetheless enriched and stimulated in some strangely dreamlike, intuitive fashion. “Fugue,” “counterpoint,” “Eroica,” “confusion resulting from excessively colored modulations,” “strict style”–all those were in essence fairy-tale whispers for us, but we heard them as gladly and as big-eyed as children listen to something incomprehensible, indeed quite inappropriate for them–and with much more delight than they get from what lies close at hand, from what is fitting and proper. Might this be considered the most intensive and proud, perhaps even the most beneficial kind of learning–anticipatory learning, learning that leaps vast stretches of ignorance? As a pedagogue I should probably not speak on its behalf, but I know for a fact that young people show extraordinary preference for it, and I suspect that with time the space that has been skipped fills up all on its own.
