Over at Hazlitt, Alana Massey walks us through the anxiety that so often accompanies reading great thinkers, laying bare her own insecurities at the altar of famed writer and critic, Susan Sontag. When she finally does sit down to read the writer she had so carefully side-stepped, her worst fears are confirmed, and she is confronted—as so many of us will be—with the intense volume of all that she does not know:
But the devastation of learning that one’s work is unoriginal is not nearly as painful as watching the circumference of the gap in one’s knowledge expand outward from a single piece of missing literature to the limitless, insurmountable pile of works yet unread.
One response
I’ve read a fair amount of Sontag, and there’s plenty to be humbled by.
But, unlike this essayist, who seems surprised by the scope of what she does not know, this should be everyone’s default view about just about everything.
The essay has a latent C.P. Snow subtext: that — of course — it’s OK not to know much about science, technology, engineering . . .
But I digress.
There is more and more not to know. The daily toil of most any serious career is to know just how little one knows.
A favorite Sontag quote: “Attention is vitality. It connects you with others.”
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