“What is mastery?” The doctor asked me. I hadn’t exactly
prepared for the philosophical turn the interview had taken.
I had been running late all day: for one thing, this was
Monday—‘nuff said. For another, we had just moved that weekend (a fiasco of
tragicomic proportions which included, but as not limited to, the power company
accidentally shutting off the juice for 24 hours). What with a new and
unfamiliar city-location, I was getting lost and therefore late every time I
left the house. Leaving extremely early for everything didn’t seem to mitigate
the problem, to my frustration. And then, what between moving, job-training, and
crisis-management (bananas for the baby and eggnog for us), I had somehow
forgot to print out a copy of my resume. Little-known fact: I’m prone to panic
attacks. Needless to say, I was pretty ragged and haggard—in short, not office
manager material by the time I made it to Dr. Bekker’s office for the
interview. At that point, I wouldn’t have hired me to be a short-order fry
cook, much less an office manager at a homeopathic practice.
“Education,” Dr. Baker leaned back in his chair as I tried
to settle down, “is about mastery,” and instead of the bullet-point
job-description low-down I expected, he gave me a quick lesson in pedagogy. The
problem with modern schooling, he remarked, is that it aims at accumulation,
not mastery. Of course, he smiled,
mastery depends on the scope of the subject: “I’ve studied homeopathy 25 years,
and I haven’t begun to master it.”
But what is mastery?
I’d like to think that college humbled me on this subject of
education. I graduated from high school much more confident about what I knew
than when I walked across the stage six months ago and shook Dr. Whalen’s hand.
As an 18-year-old, I had wanted to be a liberal arts major, to study everything. Of course, you can’t do that
at Hillsdale, weirdly enough, so I settled on English: it’s cohesive, unifying,
blah, blah, blah.
I’m glad I did.
I found that nothing reveals your ignorance like burrowing
deeply into a subject. It’s like an intellectual Heisenberg uncertainty
principle, and it’s depressing. The world shies away from discursion.
I’ve studied all four poems of the Medieval Pearl-Poet (you may know “Gawain and the
Green Knight”). They’re some of the most stunning works in English, perhaps in
any language, and I know them probably better than any other comparable body of
work. I know them well enough to know I don’t know them. I, of course, only
spent 3 months with them, which is an absurd space of time in which to expect
mastery, but stil.
If the danger of specialization is myopia, as the
liberal-artsy types argue, the generalist’s boogie might very well be hubris:
thinking that political theory can be summed up by the Magna Carta and U.S.
Constitution or that knowing one’s case endings constitutes knowledge of Latin.
The specialist, if he’s honest, knows how unknowable the world is, how it
recedes at every point. Knowledge kisses reality through a bridal veil.
So you’re going to college? About to start an apprenticeship
or technical school? Welcome, to use another metaphor, to the greatest
hide-and-go-seek game of all times. Tag. You’re it.
Like riding an exponential function, you ain’t never gonna
touch x, baby.
Don’t mistake me for a mystic or a pessimist—though I do err
in both directions. An exponential function gets close enough to the axis to nearly
skin its nose. Being a specialist is not like Moses ascending to see the
Promised Land, with a noble mournfulness, as from afar. Sometimes I feel that
way, but that’s mostly laziness. Nonetheless, mastery does, I think, reveal
mystery.
Consider, by way of analogy, friendship. Perhaps it’s just
me, but I find it much easier to describe people I don’t know well. I would shudder
to describe quipily my best friends.
Sometimes my dad (the “anonymous” who often comments here) ask me why
I’m friends with so-and-so; I don’t know what to say. Who could contain the
scope of a soul in 140 characters? Those I thought I knew best surprise me
most. The friendships I discovered particularly during college taught me that
trust and predictability are not mutually contingent. They may even be mutually
incompatible. I don’t know. I could write you a zinger of a personality
analysis for the diner waitress this morning--mustard-stains and blowsy hair
included--but for, say, my dear blog co-writer Betsy? No, I really couldn’t
even start. But I do know, all the
same.
Perhaps that mystery is what dear old St. John was getting at in his Revelation, about
God giving a secret name to each.
I was listening to “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” (yeah, I
confess; I make up excuses to drive around just to listen to NPR) the other
day, and they had astrophysicist Adam Reiss who won a Nobel Prize this year. He
said that he got into astrophysics because of how much we didn’t know—and then,
by gum, he discovered we knew even less than we thought—dark energy, etc. I don’t
think the old pagans would have been surprised, personally. But we do have names for everything, he said.
So we’re still Adam, slapping names onto things we’ve only just seen--but,
perhaps, half the knowing is in that name?
We domesticate the world through words. That’s our job, from
the beginning. A master names. And yet we know that our names only approximate,
circle around, that true name, true knowledge, of a thing. It’s all
stuttering—but stuttering is speech, too, and our words are true. Just as we
approach, asymptotically,* that divinely given name, the more find ourselves
speechless, I think—like Thomas Aquinas or Gregory the Great who Dante has
laughing at himself re his speculation about the angels.
What’s mastery? It’s sweating to find the right word; it’s
near-god-like gaze of seeing the whole and
all its parts; it’s eating the crop you raise from and raze back to soil, in
reverence. If your hackles are still prickling that I dared put down that
intellectually-obese character, the well-rounded generalist—padded with Plato,
rolling in Shakespeare, with a spot of Cezanne on his chin—forgive me. Mastery means
the happy marriage of generalist and specialist.
*Note for math nerds: I know that in contemporary
mathematics, an asymptote can
actually intersect the line. Don’t get mad at me. I learned, like, Euclidean
geometry ‘n’ stuff, so I’m still living in a mathematic world a couple millennia
out of date. Forgive me.
