Birdbrain is a misnomer.

The tiny hummingbird in our garden, which weighs about the same as our soon-to-be-forgotten penny, travels three thousand miles twice annually, a six-week journey. That’s concentration.

I’m lucky if I can keep my mind focused for the two hours it takes me to compose these paragraphs.

I favor “featherbrain,” for its airy overtones, or “dingbat”, for recalling long-ago printers. Before wingdings were wingdings, they were dingbats – colons, parentheses, ampersands, pilcrows and the like (“pilcrow”’s new to me too).

In short, I can’t concentrate worth a damn, never could, while classmates could bury their brains in econ or bio textbooks. Capable of commanding my attention, I might have been a musician, but I couldn’t stay focused on practicing the organ, which was my initial college major. My first hour practicing I was all eyes and ears; two hours later I’d wake to the realization my brain had drifted into aimless improvisation, not unlike what it’s doing now.

How I envy the concentrators! It took Wagner 26 years to compose the four operas in his Ring Cycle. Can you imagine at age sixty-one being satisfied with themes you’d dreamt up at thirty-five! It took Proust the last fourteen years of his life to make his big book and he didn’t quite finish. Robert Caro has been working on his irresistible five-volume biography of LBJ for forty-eight of his nearly ninety years and he’s not done yet (Go, Bob!).

My fidgety brain will squeeze out this missive – and, with luck, maybe a second, if I’m feeling my oats.

What’s the difference between them and me?

Not a clue. But since cerebration is my recreation, let’s explore:

1) My ornery rebellious nature. I resist orders, my own especially. Ask me to do something, I’m eager, I enjoy assisting. Tell me to do something, and good luck to us both. Reason struggles to rule and overrule this puerile petulance, with unsatisfying results.

2) My boredom threshold is no higher than a door sill. Once I “get the idea” my attention scurries elsewhere and my eyes glaze. I hate this – it’s rude and I miss things – but we play the hand we’re dealt.

3) My curiosity is as insatiate and incessant as dog-pal Henry’s nostrils. I’m forever sniffing. A question flickers like a firefly in my skull and off I dart in pursuit. So far this missive I’ve read up on hummingbirds, dingbats (including a new word, pilcrow), the chronologies of Wagner, Proust, and Caro, and we’re not done.

4) I distrust certitude. Who knows for certain, in my view, has quit thinking, settled on a conclusion like a bird on a twig so it can rest from flight. My epitaph, if I welcome one (which I won’t), might be “Yes, but – ”

Isaiah Berlin wrote a famous essay about this contrast – between birdbrains and, say, elephant-brains – called “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” His epigraph comes from Heraclitus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Some thinkers, he argued, see the world through a single organizing principle, while others quizzically explore the chaos of human outlooks. In the first group he placed Plato, Dante, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Hegel; in the second, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Goethe, and Tolstoy. I much prefer my clubmates.

Berlin himself was a fox sans pareil, looking into everything, writing agreeably about everything, but only essays, nothing at exhaustive (or exhausting) length. He’s not much read today. “His style,” we’re told, “– urbane, digressive, rich in allusion – belongs to a more old-fashioned essay tradition.”

Oh well. Missed the boat again.