I'm not sure if it's a waste of time, but I love rereading books and re-watching movies. Last night I watched an old favourite, Good Will Hunting. There's a scene where Sean, a psychiatrist, and Will, a troubled young man, have this conversation:
“Will: So what’s this? A Taster’s Choice moment between guys? This is really nice. You got a thing for swans? Is this like a fetish? It’s something, like, maybe we need to devote some time to?
Sean: I thought about what you said to me the other day, about my painting. Stayed up half the night thinking about it. Something occurred to me and I fell into a deep, peaceful sleep and haven’t thought about you since. You know what occurred to me?
Will: No.
Sean: You’re just a kid. You don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.
Will: Why, thank you.
Sean: It’s all right. You’ve never been out of Boston.
Will: Nope.
Sean: So if I asked you about art you’d probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written...Michelangelo? You know a lot about him. Life’s work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientation, the whole works, right?
But I bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You’ve never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling. Seen that....
If I asked you about women you’d probably give me a syllabus of your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can’t tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy.
You’re a tough kid. I ask you about war, and you’d probably—uh—throw Shakespeare at me, right? “Once more into the breach, dear friends.” But you’ve never been near one. You’ve never held your best friend’s head in your lap and watched him gasp his last breath, looking to you for help.
And if I asked you about love y’probably quote me a sonnet. But you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone could level you with her eyes. Feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you...who could rescue you from the depths of hell. And you wouldn’t know what it’s like to be her angel and to have that love for her to be there forever. Through anything. Through cancer. You wouldn’t know about sleeping sittin’ up in a hospital room for two months holding her hand because the doctors could see in your eyes that the term visiting hours don’t apply to you.
You don’t know about real loss, because that only occurs when you love something more than you love yourself. I doubt you’ve ever dared to love anybody that much.
I look at you; I don’t see an intelligent, confident man; I see a cocky, scared shitless kid. But you’re a genius, Will. No one denies that. No one could possibly understand the depths of you. But you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine and you ripped my fuckin’ life apart.
You’re an orphan right? Do you think I’d know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you? Personally, I don’t give a shit about all that, because you know what? I can’t learn anything from you I can’t read in some fuckin’ book. Unless you wanna talk about you, who you are. And I’m fascinated. I’m in. But you don’t wanna do that, do you, sport? You’re terrified of what you might say. Your move, chief. ”
I love learning from reading. But when one comes to see reading as the only method of learning, there can emerge an ugly side - it can lead us to believe we know more than we actually do. This is something I am afraid of falling into.
Reading can expose us to new ideas that we ourselves might not be able to experience directly. But there are people who have had these direct experiences, and when we meet these people, we should not presume to know more than they do; it's about being humble in recognizing our own limitations.
In school, we learn subjects as stand alone areas of knowledge. But a lot of important learning comes from a multi-disciplinary approach where we take principles from one field and apply them in a different field. Humans borrow design principles from nature; we have examined the beehive's hexagonal structure and the spider's silk composition, and applied these learnings in engineering and chemistry.
As we learn about tangible subjects from different disciplines, we learn about life from various sources. Reading is an excellent activity, but it is not so much a replacement for actual experiences as it is a supplement. As they say, sometimes you need to pass your own hand through the flame to learn what it means to burn.
