I read Jakob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man over Christmas - what do you mean you don't have it? Stop mum-mum-mumming your lips together and go and buy it directly: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ascent-Man-Jacob-Bronowski/dp/1849901155/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1299101180&sr=8-3
It basically does what it says on the dustjacket - it charts the ascent of mankind from our earliest scrabblings around in the dust for worms and dignity and such, and then carries on, through our discoveries of architecture, biology, alchemy/chemistry, the whole lot. It is pretty easy to get through the first couple of chapters, because essentially you're going "Yeah, I can do that, I can use an opposable thumb, whatever", "S'alright, I attended a bricklaying and rudimentaries of masonry class at Dudley College when I was 10 - I could build that Roman aqueduct for you in a long weekend, no joke of a lie" and so on. So I don't know exactly at what point - it may have been when Newton started splitting light into the spectrum and then applying that knowledge, it may have been the Industrial Revolution - but at some point I realised I was no longer able to keep up. I was stumped, as a human. You can put me in a room with all manner of widgets and doobobs and I will never be able to harness the power of steam for you. I will certainly never be able to fly you to the moon or understand what goes on in a microbe, or any other science after SATs, essentially.
The problem is, we all decide what we are and aren't good at at a very early age. We choose history over geography at GCSE and we never look back, safe in the knowledge that pretty much everything taught at schools is (a) useless, (b) mindshrinkingly dull and (c) nothing to do with our imminent grinding futures as overfed computer bison, snorfling our way to a new tax bracket. What we forget, however, is that we should not be learning because it looks good on our CV, or makes our UCAS forms stand out, or even because we need desperately to seem intellectual in bars that are too quiet, or when accidentally talking to someone else's parents.
We should be learning because it is Our Duty as human beings.
We have nothing more in our lives than what is going on in our heads. In my case, I guess I have that Maurice Sendak-type forest that I described to you earlier - but that's all I have. Literally the only thing we can do with our tiny discarded foreskins of lives is to pack it full of as much of the world as possible. I have realised recently that so much of it less is boring than I had assumed. It is humbling to admit all that we don't know, rather than keep peddling the glib shininess of the fourteen things we know for sure. As I have been warbling about in this blog these last few times, it is only when you start having a right good viddy at everything around you that you become aware of the interconnectedness of things. And THEN, when you've wrenched yourself out of the car-seat of your comfort zone and moved all the way up to sitting with daddy, you can make glorious cross-references like this guy, photographer Nick Knight:
this is his website: http://www.nickknight.com/main.html
This is also a man who is fond of explosions and painting with colour, just like The Firework Men:
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| Another Man Paint Explosions, Purple on Blue, Autumn Winter 2005 |
How do I put it? Do you want the landscape of your brain to look like an outlet of B&Q, with shelf after shelf of vacuum-packed, untested tools of ideas that you sealed up in there for safekeeping but never (because we all know it is humanly impossible to break inside vacuum packing - probably because vacuums are full of dark matter, which keeps the toothbrush heads locked away in there) ever opened; OR do you want your brain to look like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Garden (before all the drowning)?
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