One of my goals for this year is to consume fewer works of art. If you know how much I love art that probably sounds like a strange and counterproductive goal. But hear me out.
For a long time I had a tendency to want to have read many of the big names in a discipline before I felt confident enough to say anything about it. Freshman year I read five books on evolutionary biology in order to write a six-page philosophy paper. Sophomore year I listened to at least one new album every day because I wanted to feel like I had a hold on music. This summer I tried for months to read a book of poetry every day. I often refused to leave rooms of museums until I’d seen every artwork.
That semi-compulsive fear of not knowing things has served me well for a while. But I’m starting to feel uneasy about it. Part of me wants to work even harder to know everything about poetry or philosophy. I keep thinking about Malcolm Gladwell’s idea that experts need 10,000 hours of practice and how I’m nowhere near that level of commitment for either discipline. I wonder if in the process of dabbling I’ve lost the capacity to become an expert on any one thing. It’s an admittedly depressing line of thinking, and I don’t recommend it.
Recently, however, I’ve tried the opposite approach. Instead of consuming lots of different albums, I’ve been primarily listening to two albums (Nick Drake’s Pink Moon and Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions). Instead of reading many books of poetry I’ve been reading a few books of poetry multiple times. I’ve gone to the Nasher only to stay half an hour in front of one drawing. It’s been refreshing, and I feel a remedial sense of calm about the whole process of understanding art. I enjoy it more, and I feel less overwhelmed.
I’m starting to come to grips with the idea that being an artist or a thinker or a journalist isn’t about having been properly educated. It’s much more about thinking and feeling deeply about something and creating the means to communicate those thoughts/feelings. Nothing magical is going to happen after having read Ulysses that would make me more able to write a novel. I’d rather engage regularly and repeatedly with the ideas of William Carlos Williams—to have them slowly creep into my daily thoughts—than to have read fifteen other poets that wouldn’t make me feel as deeply.
It seems like an obvious lesson, but for me it wasn’t. I often feel inadequate for not having read texts that are central to the disciplines that I love, for not having read Dante or Yeats or Hegel. I see books on other people’s shelves and make promises to read that I only rarely keep. And I don’t think I’m the only one who feels that way. But I have to constantly remind myself that not even the experts read everything. My philosophy advisor once told me he knew about an English professor who had never read Hamlet. Though I laughed at the time, I’m sure he or she was still a perfectly good professor.
Lately I’ve been writing most of my poems about a single drawing by Matisse. Visual art is something I’ve never been all that knowledgeable about, and I never once claim in my poems that I know what Matisse is trying to do. But I’ve been very open to learning from that drawing, maybe most of all because I’m not bogged down by ideas of what I should be learning and should be seeing. Instead I’m learning in order that I can best express what it is that makes me so compelled. I’m figuring out where I stand in relation to the work and what I want to do in response to it, how my own poetry should change to accommodate it.
There are so many things and people I haven’t understood nearly as well as I’ve understood that single Matisse drawing because I haven’t been forced to reconcile my stance toward them in my own art. Williams Carlos Williams once advised a poet to “write what’s in front of your nose.” I think what he means is that part of the hardest work of art is not to become the most knowledgeable but to take the material for art that is already with us and communicate it to others. One of the great difficulties and joys of writing poetry is that it requires me to articulate how and why and what I believe about the things and people nearest to me, and frequently that process makes everyday events feel strange and real.
It’s a shift I’ve seen cross over into other facets of my life. While many of my friends are scrambling to see all of the people that have meant something to them before they graduate, I’ve mostly stayed in close contact with a few people. I’ve gone to the same restaurants, and I’ve ordered the same meals. I’m trying to figure out what it is about the people around me that so compels me to be with them, to figure out what I like about the meals I like and the restaurants I like. I’m trying to be less passive about my relationship to the things that I enjoy. And I’m becoming more confident that it’s okay to know only a few things well, that life isn’t necessarily about having seen everything but having known the familiar with foreign eyes.
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