I saw someone online the other day who claimed to be a “polymath.” And of course, the last person who would ever use that word to describe themselves is a genuine one—at least to the extent that such a thing is even possible these days. It struck me as a kind of Dunning–Kruger variant, or maybe just the plain old vanilla version.
It reminded me of when I first began reading fine books. When I came to the United States, and suddenly buying books wasn’t a luxury, I realized I couldn’t even come up with a list of ten really interesting titles to read.
Today, if you locked me in a room for five years and threw away the key, I wonder if I will be able to finish the books on my reading list, including those in my anti-library (see below).
There’s a certain irony to all of this. The more one learns, about the nature of things, about how the world works in its elastic, interwoven way, the clearer it becomes that the well is too deep. Knowledge doesn’t expand into mastery; there is a sense in which it dissolves into mystery. The horizon keeps receding.
Related: On Antilibrary
Nassim Taleb via Black Swan:
“The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means … allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an Antilibrary.”