Eccentric Flower:199907/Talking to myself

From Eccentric Flower

«July 1999 «Eccentric Flower

The thing of this entry is, Iain and Moira's objections are absolutely correct; but I feel like they don't address what I had actually been trying to say, which probably means I said it badly. Somewhere in the preceding entry, there was a message that specific knowledge isn't important and that we should all be tolerant of what others do/don't know - oh, yes, there is, go back and look, it's in there - but that got lost in all the comparative examples. As it has done every time, every single time, I have written about this topic.

I stand by the theory below: People get so bent out of shape thinking, "Oh, wow, Columbina thinks I'm worthless if I don't know [insert specific piece of knowledge here]" - which I do not say. There are things I get a little disappointed if you don't know, but it's hardly fatal - just as I'm sure there are things you expect me to know and are disappointed when I don't.

Here's the key point, which I have learned to get at more lucidly in the ten years since the below: Know things.
I don't give a shit what you know, but I want you to love knowledge and the accumulation of knowledge.
I want you to have what REM describes in the next entry as "an acquisitive mind," and unlike him, I'm not likely to attempt to find your good points if you don't. If you don't have an acquisitive mind, while I do not condemn you, I'm not sure I know how to have a conversation with you, and I'm not sure I want to try.

There are people who really don't want to know anything. They would be happiest if their brains were totally empty and they could just let their gray matter leak out their ears. I fear these people; they baffle me. Despite your phobias, I have never met any of you who are actually like that - although I have encountered some co-workers and other people who fit the description, far more times than I care to recollect.

Talking to myself

Ah, the high-speed world of the web. I write something; fifteen minutes later I get a reply; I sit down to compose a new entry because of that reply; I work on it for ten minutes more, and then my browser crashes and eats it all. In the old days, it would have taken me five times as long to lose a thousand words.

Actually, the respite was probably good, because the entry was nasty and incoherent - I got called an elitist, and, as predicted, reacted by snarling. I'm calmer now; I still have the same reply, but now hopefully it'll make sense.

Here are some quotes from Iain's message:

I thought about dancing delicately around the question, but if one of your drop-dead-pass-or-fail tests of humanity is whether or not someone knows who Faust was, then, yes, you are an elitist.

Stop snarling.

[T]here are many people back home, good people to know, whom I wouldn't expect to know [about Faust]. To be sure, I'm probably wronging a lot of them, who may have picked up more than I thought, but I just wouldn't expect or ask it of them. If I had to talk to them about it, to make a point, I'd ask if they knew it, and if they said no, then I'd give a quick and dirty summary. I'm not going to say that someone isn't worthwhile as a human because they haven't got my high-falutin' education. Would I want to talk to them about The Philosophical Issues of The Great Books? Probably not, since they likely haven't read them (although they might have some unique insights anyway). Would I want to talk to them about Great Philosophical Issues generally - life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, etc? Maybe. Depends on the person and the conversation. Would I want to shoot the shit with them, talk about how their day went, what their kids were doing, all that usual "life" stuff? Of course.

Education as a test of humanity - or even who is worth talking to - is just silly.

And here's Moira:

I can respect your decisions as far as determining who is worth knowing (or speaking to) and what people ought to know but I stumble over the idea that your standards can be so specific ....

More power to you if you really feel this way but I can't even comprehend it. How can you decide whether a person is worth knowing based on what they haven't been exposed to? It seems so horribly limiting - I can understand using it as a means of determining who you might have more in common with - but does that also determine who is worth knowing?

The answer to you both: I don't believe that the amount or kind of information someone's accumulated is a valid test of their humanity. I don't even believe it's a fair test of who's worth knowing. If I actually believed either of these things, you'd be justified in your reactions. (I realize I wasn't altogether lucid in the previous entry.)

It is, however, often the only test I have - albeit a badly flawed one - for whether I will want to have a conversation with someone.

Look, I admit this vice: I only want to deal with people who meet a certain standard of intelligence. I'm not trying to surround myself with geniuses - I'm no genius myself - but I do want to associate with people who can think, people who are reasonably alert to the world around them.

I do not consider this elitist. What I consider "elitist" - the part that rankles - is when someone is smug about how much knowledge he has - "he" because I don't know any women who do this -it's a Julian trait which I cannot abide, more so because I sometimes lapse and commit this sin myself. Generally I am so embarrassed afterward that I don't speak up again for days. It is always bad form to show off, or to look down on someone for ignorance. There are plenty of things I'm ignorant about, and there always will be, and I believe in the benefit of the doubt.

I'm not trying to make anyone feel excluded, or hurt. I know every time I go off on this rant, my friends get nervous: "Oh, I'd better not open my mouth or Columbine will see how dumb I am and not want to talk to me." Nonsense and other stronger words. You have nothing to fear. Believe me. I could tell you why you have nothing to fear, but it would either end up sounding egotistical or patronizing - when it's meant to be neither - so just take my word for it.

I don't want to be evil or exclusionary; I just want to have interesting conversations. The older I get, the less patience I have for boredom. Some people say this is because my attention span's getting shorter, which is untrue. It's that, at the ripe age of thirty-one, I hear the chariot at my back - there will never again be enough time for everything. My one complaint with my existence is that I've reached the point where I really enjoy my life and it's nearly half over. This makes me impatient.

I am unabashedly selfish - if I am in a conversation, I expect it to hold my interest. (To be completely fair, I expect it to hold everyone else's interest too. If three people are conversing, all of them should be interested in what's being said. When one of them loses interest, it's time to change the topic.)

Testing for information is a bad way to test for conversation. I know that. It leads to those Julian excesses - "I know more than you do, so I must be better than you" - and it places way too much value on trivia and other cruft, at the expense of the people who don't know squat about Faust, but can deliver a fantastic story about learning the proper way to use a hammer, as in this book about hand tools I'm reading.

But I can't think of a better way. I am not inclined to take risks here. I want you to hold my interest the first time - and, yes, vice versa. (I obsess a lot about the latter.) Patrick worries about his conversations - but doesn't realize how he presents himself. If he'd been as tedious on our first meeting as he apparently thinks he was, there wouldn't have been a second meeting. Call me horrid if you like.

Perhaps my standards are ruthless because I expect people to do the same to me. I am always surprised when people say they'd like to see me again; I do not believe I present myself well in public. (I prattle on and on, just like I do here, or I clam up and say nothing.)

I don't believe I would give myself the time of day if I encountered my clone. Perhaps that's the reason behind many of my warped attitudes - I don't like what I see in the mirror, in many senses of the words.

You might say that I'm insisting that my friends be something that isn't me. Except, of course, that I tend to gravitate to people who like talking about the same things I like talking about. So it seems that I'm at cross-purposes with myself.

What else is new, eh?