Jake Garner knows the score. In the swim, on the ball, up to the minute, he knows the names of actors and movies (and nominees at Cannes!); the antics of maybe fifty Congress critters (with the loudest mouths); restaurants, flowers, daily paces (from his Fitbit); the president of Slovakia (no, really); how to pronounce the Thai PM; the date of England’s general election; the latest on global warming (don’t ask); who’s dating whom on the celebrity circuit and who’s screwing whom in the corridors of commerce. He can list the improvements in Apple’s newest smartphone and rattle off enough about AI to make you cross-eyed (it doesn’t take much). Affable and handsome, his info-reams enhance his popularity, the life of the party, he knows so much neat stuff.
A contemporary urban type, Jake’s technology-enabled. In a small, unchanging community, his gush of did-you-knows would exhaust and annoy. The better you know folks, the less you need to impress them. The less you show up, the more you need to show off, to leave your mark. Jake’s store of shareable chatter is incessantly replenished by electronic devices as never before in history. Click on laptop, iPad, smart-phone, smart-watch, and an infinitude gushes – instantly – an unpleasant plethora, which must be stanched, lest we drown.
Younger, eager to impress, I envied Jake’s fun facts and ready recall, with which he sprinkled conversations the way you sprinkle ice-cream cones. The life of the party! My most apt remarks occur after my goodbyes. (The witty French call this l’esprit de l’escalier, the spirit of the stairs, the realization, on the way out, what one should have said, if only one were quicker.) Oh, to be a polymath, who knew all about all, and could access that trove in a trice!
These days I long to know less. Brains are finite containers: the fuller of fluff, the less room for substance. Fun facts remind me of those Styrofoam pellets used in packing: un-reusable, they scatter annoyingly. I want to know one thing truly, not lots glibly. That requires concentration, silence, the elimination of distractions.
Frost wrote one of his (and our language’s) best poems about this. If you know it, you’ll welcome rereading it, it’s that good. If you don’t, let me make your day.
Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.
Truth is like that – barely glimpsed – beyond our face – in a moment of solitude, stillness – “white, uncertain” – till blurred by a breeze.
Thoreau offered like advice for the same reason (in prose taut as the best poem):
Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.
Outgrowing envy is among the sweetest blessings of age. Babble on, Jake, babble on.