(As someone not endowed with a reliable memory for details, I've learned to make a virtue of approaching things with a mind unsophisticated by the sort of knowledge we academics are supposed to seek on every topic - surely it's more valiant to go into battle unarmed but eager!) And yet: is there any such thing as useless knowledge?My sister's question comes back to me as I step back into a New York life in which Australia, to put it bluntly, might as well be on the moon. Most of the things I learned (and many of which I mentioned in this blog) are at best esoteric. But is it useless knowledge?
Maybe the question should rather be: does usefulness correlate in any significant way with knowledge? I'm reminded of those Aborigines whose intimate knowledge of their land and its every inhabitant, a knowledge more supple and detailed than anything most of us can even imagine, can seem less than nothing to an outsider, or to a life divorced from the life of the land. I'm reminded in a different way of Hector, the old-fashioned teacher in "The History Boys" who fought the idea that education should be useful: one learns things one can't understand now so as to be prepared when things one can't yet imagine come.
As you may know I am a devoté of "liberal arts education," which aims at a kind of higher usefulness which, to the utilitarian presentist, seems closer to uselessness. At some level it isn't about usefulness at all. It's important to learn how to learn, we say. Or (for American students especially!) to know what knowledge is, and that there is always more to something than you first think. I'd want to add that it's important to know that everything
fits together somehow (we need not be able to spell out every link), and that you therefore can't really fully know anything until you know everything - or at least that one should never stop expecting things to fit together, to complicate and illuminate each other. An open mind is more important than a mind full of knowledge (though it's better to know something, and to keep learning!).It's too soon to say what Australia will contribute to my understanding of things, but I've no doubt it will be a valuable contribution. And since mine is a permuting mind, a gift that keeps on giving!
These pictures are from a wonderful picture book called The Arrival by the West Australian illustrator Shaun Tan. In sepia-colored sketches laid out like photos in an old album, it tells the story of a refugee, a man who makes his way to a strange and distant land and later sends for his wife and daughter. (The picture at top shows the city where he arrives; the one immediately above the life-cycle of an indigenous plant.) The book is without words. Tan has managed to evoke the continuing strangeness of an unfamiliar country - not only its architecture and writing and clocks are different,
but the animals and even the foods people eat. Tan started with the accounts of his father, who arrived in Perth from Malaysia in 1960, but mixes in material from migrants (as im- and emigrants are called in Australia) to America, too. The resulting story succeeds, I think, in speaking to and for any experience of being a stranger in a strange land.
