#my brother in Christ I need you to give an essay novel level of context to everything you keep saying

[moophinz]

RGG really is old man yaoi

[grandhotelabyss]

I'm not really sure how to phrase this question, but — what would you say feel to you like the biggest limits on your understanding? Or maybe a better way to put it is 'what do you wish you knew'?

I don't mean like 'the meaning of life' or 'how to write a perfect novel every single time on the first draft', or even 'is there life on mars' or 'how to read linear A & B'. I mean what information exists, that you wish was contained in your mind (whether it's because of a lack of time or aptitude)?

(For context: I write this after reading Naomi Kanaka's latest essay where she mentions "the other five major post-Bronze Age language traditions (Sanskrit, Chinese, Persian, Mayan and Arabic)". And, having read maybe five works from all those traditions put together, I just muttered to myself 'my brother in Christ, you are so fucking undereducated'. Of course by such a standard we basically all are, so I'm not losing sleep; but I think the example stands).

I really don't know any of that material: languages, history, any science, any mathematics. I have a smattering of the modern Romance languages, as much history as I picked up in the course of a general humanities education and a life as a news junkie, a journalistic idea of "science" if that, a basic sense of the outline of western philosophy mostly sans specifics, and—my claim to fame—some general opinions about mostly modern and mostly western literature. I was just ruefully rereading the pages on Casaubon's characteristically provincial limitations of knowledge in Middlemarch—he doesn't know German!—and thinking about how I am somewhat below him, and well below George Eliot, who translated Spinoza and Feuerbach (I have merely read Spinoza, sort of, in someone else's translation; I know Feuerbach on an encyclopedia-entry level). I have a Ph.D. that is essentially what a B.A. used to be, and a B.A. that is essentially what a high-school diploma used to be; my greatest educational advantage is that nuns once forced me to use a protractor to diagram sentences when my age was in the single digits. My main "intellectual" attainment is one you mention: my first-draft novels are pretty good, if I do say so myself! But otherwise I don't know much, and I'm not even sure I'd be happier if I did. To give you a serious answer, I wish I could "download" all I need to know about world religions, but the details tend to flee from me, though I have formally studied the subject in part. I once saw in a day planner or something an inspirational sentence from Einstein: "Imagination is more important than knowledge." Did he say that? I don't know. But I will cling to it.