Wednesday, July 09, 2008

On Ignorance and Lawrence Durrell

Peter Ackroyd once remarked to me that the older he got, the more ignorant he realised he was. True, I thought. This must have been at least fifteen years ago, so we must both now be labouring under the burden of an awareness of more or less total ignorance. Well, I am anyway. I say this because my matutinal urge to blog has, today, been stalled by an oppressive sense that I don't know anything. I am staring at a series of thoughts of the day from my preferred sources - that we are in a bear market (don't know), that estate agents will go out of business (don't know but I do think we could do with far fewer),  that there's a lot of sadomasochism around (don't know and don't care),  that Cameron and Obama will fix our broken societies (really don't know but feel it is unlikely) and so on. Dismayed, I fell back on something I do know - that these really were the worst aircraft of all time. Or were they? Journalists are required to conceal their ignorance. This is fair enough to the extent that, within limits, we probably do know slightly more than most. It is not fair enough to the extent that it supports the blustering and preening of columnists or sustains the comfort zone of public discourse. But, of course, everybody pretends to know more than they do or to be more certain than they actually are. I suppose we must, otherwise, like me this morning, we'd spend our entire time in a condition of slack-jawed immobility and indecision. The way to avoid this is to, as it were, sweat the small stuff, in my case to suppress my tendency to generalise or to race too quickly to the big picture, which is, of course, the prime source of all error. Nige has always been much better than me at sticking with the small stuff; he remembers the names of butterflies, I don't. God really is in the details (Mies). In fact, now I think of it, my crisis was probably brought on by Lawrence Durrell's Prospero's Cell, which I was reading last night. Durrell - now largely unread, I think, but, of course, I don't know - was a great descriptive stylist. His sentences are loaded with close-ups because, to him, what matters is the sensuously exact detail. I was impressed and, I hope, influenced because, in the midst of such lovely precision, ignorance of the big picture might turn out to be bliss.

16 comments:

  1. Talking about journalistic lack of knowledge, the Royal Aircraft B.E.2 in that list of Worst Aircraft is described as having fought in WWII as opposed to WWI. Even I knew that, and I really am ignorant. Still, they do say that knowledge of your own ignorance is the first step on the path to wisdom.

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  2. I noticed that, Recusant, but probably lacked the confidence this morning...

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  3. ... my tendency to generalise or to race too quickly to the big picture, which is, of course, the prime source of all error.

    I think you might be doing that again in this post, Bryan. Don't stop though, it's what makes this blog so interesting.

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  4. As John Sebastian put it, Now I see that the more I see the more I see there is to see...

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  5. In fact, Nige, I now remember walking along King's Parade discussing rainfall and you saying, "That's what's wrong with your method" in response to some hasty generalisation.

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  6. Bryan, I hope you're wrong about ignorance increasing with age, otherwise I'm in real trouble...

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  7. As I gaze out at my A Level classes the thought of them becoming even more ignorant is simply too terrible to contemplate.

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  8. You do wonder if there’s a residual resentment towards Durrell in England: his cosmopolitanism, abundant gifts & ambition & that late but significant success; and “Pudding Island” as he once called her rarely forgets a slight. He was a master of the lyric too, & it’s depressing how unfamiliar that work is to the majority – Peter Porter wrote that A Private Country was the most accomplished poetic debut (LD's first full-length collection) of the last century beside Harmonium; wouldn’t go that far myself but I’d to remember to breathe when I bought a first edition in Hay this year for a song: wartime paper, Eliot’s editorial shadow. Marvellous.

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  9. I don't think ignorance increases with age (surely not), but there should be an improvement in one's ability to recognise one's limitations. That guy John Sebastian puts it better I suppose.

    Life is fragmented. Our instinct is to piece it all together to try make some kind of sense of it. Otherwise, we'd go mad. As Iris Murdoch put it, we see parts of things, but we intuit whole things.

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  10. I'm not positive, Neil, but I think it is called "pattern recognition" and that it is more dominant as we age.

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  11. Here I sit on the high prairie of North America, just east of the Rockies near the Canadian border. I keep a box full of Lawrence Durrell and Gerald Durrell paperbacks which cost me very little as books and a great deal in terms of postage. Right now I'm working through "Constance" which is about the beginning of WWII, seen through the eyes of the usual small band of aesthetes.

    To me these tiny details and character sketches explain far more about what happened and why than the many far more grand historical tomes. And are much more rewarding to read anyway.

    Prairie Maqry

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  12. Here is the kind of thing that makes us humans think "everything is connected." I was on the train from Wash., D.C., to Philadelphia today and absorbed in reading a two-part (I had to go through the train to find Part II, and ultimately had to borrow it from a sleeping conductor -- alas, I had to wake him to get it) story in the Washington Post's Style section. This story was about a guy named Randall Smith who lived in a crummy house in a poor village called Pearlsburg (in Virginia) near the Appalachian Trail.

    In 1981, he killed a young couple on the trail after having dinner with them. How was he caught? When the searchers went looking for the backpackers and began to fan out from the shelter on the trail in which they discovered blood, they turned up a backpack in the leaves. In the backpack was a book, which had a bloody finger print in it. The book was Lawrence Durrell's "Mountolive." The bloody finger print belonged to Randall Smith. The bodies were buried in their sleeping bags in shallow graves nearby.

    I rarely think of Durrell, only when someone (usually Frank Wilson) gets going on how good "The Alexandria Quartet" is. But I thought about that book earlier today and now, home, and skipping about among my favorite blogs, I'm thinking of it again. What are the statistical chances of two Durrell refs in one day?

    By the way, Part II of the Post story was about another pair of hikers Smith tried to kill this year -- he shot them multiple times, but neither died. Smith, however, IS dead now, having died in a prison hospital. (I knew you'd want to know the end of his story.) Smith had a miserable life with no father and a poor, kind of whacked-out mom; he never had friends or girlfriends; but otherwise there was no motive for what he did. Random evil from Randall. The point of the story may perhaps just have been to scare the many people who hike parts of the Appalachian Trail in the summer.

    And so, another comment on journalism: What is the point of it these days, besides titillation?

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  13. Don't know how the V22 Osprey didn't make it onto that list. Or maybe it's so bad it doesn't actually count as an aircraft.

    Not everyone pretends to know more than they do - it's a hazard of the intelligent and, even more, the half-intelligent. Regular people seem better at just shrugging about things. Sometimes, very intelligent people, after a lifetime, arrive at this same shrug.

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  14. elberry, now and again you summing up is a joy to behold, I deeply admire people who can express in a minimum of words what others take for ever to do.
    I award you the dynamiters medal for one liners.

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  15. That cheered me up on an otherwise rather grim afternoon in Manchestere, Malty, cheers!

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