The joy of knowing nothing
A new microgenre of what passes for literature has appeared on the scene: the omnididact's tale.
Perhaps because everyone feels so stupid, we witness the impulse to get smarter, preferably by reading one book. A tongue-in-cheek version of this quest unfolds in A.J. Jacobs's recent outing, ''The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World." The New York Times called Jacobs's journey through the 44-million-word Encyclopedia Britannica ''mesmerizingly uninformative."
The widely admired Bill Bryson swung at a similar pitch not so long ago, in ''A Short History of Nearly Everything." The casual observer might be forgiven for confusing Bryson's self-described ''intellectual odyssey of a lifetime" with science writer Timothy Ferris's ''The Whole Shebang: A State of the Universe(s) Report," a book that purported to ''summarize what we know about the cosmos and how we know it."
With some fanfare, New Yorker writer David Denby enrolled in two of Columbia's vaunted core curriculum programs to re-immerse himself in the Great Books a few years ago. The Great Book writers, for those of you not in the know, are Homer, Plato, and Augustine, not Roth, Coulter, and Dan Brown. After ''Great Books," Denby's next tome was ''American Sucker," a chronicle of the breakup of his marriage and his ruinous addiction to stock market trading.
From Homer to broken home. Coincidence . . . or something more?
I would never read any of these books, because I have no thirst for this showy breadth of knowledge. I aspire instead to know smaller things, and to know them well. I would like to understand the dark art of women's dress sizes -- why the
A friend told me that there was a moment, around 2001, when the number of people living on earth exactly matched the total of all persons who had ever lived on the planet. So one wonders: When was the last time it was possible to know everything? When did the sum total of human knowledge surpass our ability to absorb it?
That moment was probably around 1536, the last year of Erasmus of Rotterdam's life. A Catholic priest and acknowledged omnididact, Erasmus was deemed to know everything there was to be known. He sure knew a lot. Otherwise, how could he have written: ''I beseech you, what man is that would submit his neck to the noose of wedlock, if, as wise men should, he did but first truly weigh the convenience of the thing?"
A.J. Jacobs's alphabetized slog through the Britannica contains no entry for Erasmus. He does mention François de la Rochefoucauld, the famous French author of ''Maximes," or short epigrams. Jacobs, alas, ignores Rochefoucauld's most telling maxim: ''All had been said, one arrives too late."
Man bites dog I think there is a book to be written: ''Everything I Need to Know I Learned from Billy Bulger." The first three chapters: Loyalty. Revenge. Payback.
Author/humorist Joe Queenan convincingly dispatched Jacobs's ''The Know-it-All" in the above-cited New York Times review. But separately, I learn, in his book ''Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile's Pilgrimage to the Mother Country," he writes: ''To this very day I entertain dreams of being buried in a Viking funeral, my corpse incinerated with a dog at my feet. The dog in question would be the jackass at The Boston Globe who always gives my books bad reviews."
Sod off, Joe, before someone starts printing your pathetic sales numbers -- 6,124 copies of ''Country" sold, according to Bookscan. So my friend Katherine Powers said your 2001 book, ''Balsamic Dreams: A Short but Self-Important History of the Baby Boomer Generation" was ''self-indulgent dreck . . . unedited repetitiveness, literary cowardice, bloat." That was after she opined that ''My Goodness: A Cynic's Short-Lived Search for Sainthood," your 1998 book, ''makes Cokie Roberts seem modest, unassuming, and interesting."
Believe me, she's no jackass. You dish it out, Joe; learn to take it. Wait until Katherine sees those awful columns you've been phoning in to Smart Money magazine. Then you'll be in real trouble.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.
