Bald Heads

Knowledge is the web to be filled and colored with feeling and desire. Looking back to the curiosities and perceptions of boyhood’s years, I recall my capture by phrenology. A shop was given to it on Broadway, where I bought a plaster head showing all the bumps. Church hours were beguiled by the study of bald heads around me.

Henry Osborn Taylor, A Historian’s Creed (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1939), pp. 80-81.

So Much To See

Terry Pratchett, The Colour of Magic (London: Corgi Books, 1985; 1983), p. 242:

   ‘Sometimes I think a man could wander across the disc all his life and not see everything there is to see,’ said Twoflower. ‘And now it seems there are lots of other worlds as well. When I think I might die without seeing a hundredth of all there is to see it makes me feel,’ he paused, then added, ‘well, humble, I suppose. And very angry, of course.’

More Particulars

GIACOMO        More particulars
Must justify my knowledge.

William Shakespeare, Cymbeline II.4.78-79.

Useless Knowledge

   What is the attraction of [Charles] Reade? At bottom it is the same charm as one finds in R. Austin Freeman’s detective stories or Lieutenant-Commander Gould’s collections of curiosities—the charm of useless knowledge. Reade was a man of what one might call penny-encyclopaedic learning. He possessed vast stocks of disconnected information which a lively narrative gift allowed him to cram into books which would at any rate pass as novels. If you have the sort of mind that takes a pleasure in dates, lists, catalogues, concrete details, descriptions of processes, junk-shop windows and back numbers of the Exchange and Mart, the sort of mind that likes knowing exactly how a medieval catapult worked or just what objects a prison cell of the eighteen-forties contained, then you can hardly help enjoying Reade. He himself, of course, did not see his work in quite this light. He prided himself on his accuracy and compiled his books largely from newspaper cuttings, but the strange facts which he collected were subsidiary to what he would have regarded as his “purpose”. For he was a social reformer in a fragmentary way, and made vigorous attacks on such diverse evils as blood-letting, the treadmill, private asylums, clerical celibacy and tight-lacing.

George Orwell, ‘Charles Reade’ in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 vols (London : Secker & Warburg, 1968), II, pp. 34-37 (II, p. 34).

Discover the Causes of Things

discite et, o miseri, causas cognoscite rerum:
quid sumus et quidnam uicturi gignimur, ordo
quis datus, aut metae qua mollis flexus et unde,
quis modus argento, quid fas optare, quid asper
utile nummus habet, patriae carisque propinquis
quantum elargiri deceat, quem te deus esse
iussit et humana qua parte locatus es in re.

Learn, o wretched men, discover the causes of things: what we are and what manner of life we were born for, what station of life we were delivered to, how and when to ease round the turning-post, what are the limits to silver, what is proper to pray for, the use of freshly minted coins, what amount should be spent on your country and how much on near relatives, to what God has in store for  you and what part you are called to play in human affairs.

Persius, Sat. III.66-72. My translation.

Old Type of Scholarship

Arthur Tilley (1851-1942), ‘The Development of Classical Learning’, The National Review, 4.20 (Oct. 1884), 163-76 (p. 163):

The old type of “scholarship,” the name by which we have been accustomed to honour “a minute acquaintance with the niceties of the dead languages,” is rapidly passing away from us. No longer is the skilful emendation of a Greek play the royal road to a bishopric; no longer do grave statesmen and men of learning beguile their leisure moments with doing Humpty Dumpty into Latin verse; a classical quotation in the House of Commons is almost an event; a false quantity falls there on unheeding ears. Yet, on the other hand, we have Greek plays, and museums of casts from ancient sculptures, and Hellenic societies, and projects of a Hellenic school at Athens; and Professor Jebb says that “probably the study of classical antiquity in the largest sense has never been more really vigorous than it is at the present day.

The Folly of Study

Placentinus (d. 1192), Sermo de legibus, 93-122:

O tu stulta scientia,
Quid prodest diligentia
Quam tu ponis in studio?
Tu es macra et pallida,
Morieris vili vita
Sine ullo gaudio!
Tu morieris in vivendo
Atque vivis moriendo,
Hec in te nichil differunt.
Languor est in te vivere
Et vivere sic est languere,
Hec tibi mortem afferunt.
Dum corpus tuum afficis,
Tu te ipsam interficis,
   Tu es homicida!
Dum sic amittis seculum
Te ponis in periculum
   De perenni vita.
Affectare scientiam,
Que inflat et superbiam
   Parit, est peccare!
Latet anguis sic in herba!
Fuge, miser, hec superba  
   Noli inculcare!
Mundum fugis et mundanum
Discis, cum sit hoc humanum.
   Quod tu semper desideras,
Sint tibi contraria;
Nil lucraris, set omnia
   Perdis, que semper feceras,
 
Oh you, foolish knowledge, what use is the diligence which you put into study? You are thin and pallid; you will pass out of a worthless life without any joy! You will die in living and you live in dying, neither makes any difference to you. Listlessness lives in you and to live is to be listless. These things will bring death to you. While you weaken your body you bring about your own death, you are a murderer! While you let the world slip away from you in such a fashion, you place yourself in peril of losing everlasting life. To seek knowledge, which puffs one up and gives birth to pride, is sin! This is the way the snake lurks in the grass! Flee, wretched man, refuse to take in these haughty things! You flee the world and you study worldliness, since it is learned. What you always desire are incompatible; you will gain nothing, rather you will lose everything which you had ever acquired.

Hermann Kantorowicz, ‘The Poetical Sermon of a Mediaeval Jurist: Placentinus and His “Sermo de Legibus” ’, Journal of the Warburg Institute, 2.1 (1938), 22-41 (pp. 38-39). My translation.

When a Person Knows Too Much

Joseph Berger and Isabel Kershner, 'Adin Steinsaltz, 83, Dies; Created Epic Translation of Talmud', New York Times (Aug. 11, 2020), p. B11:

“Sometimes when a person knows too much, it causes him to do nothing,” he said. “It seems it’s better sometimes for a man, as for humanity, not to know too much about the difficulties and believe more in the possibilities.” – Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz (1937-2020)

'Never tell me the odds.' - Han Solo