Scientific Literature

I enjoy learning things. Anything at all. My girlfriend has recently been on a baking kick, everything from sandwich bread to pecan pies. I've enjoyed her experimentation in baking because it means I get to eat lots of tasty and (according to her) healthy breads, but I've also enjoyed asking her about what she's learned from delving into the science and art of bakery. She's gotten more books on bread and baking than I can count from our library in the last month or so and reads them whenever she gets the chance, so I've been able to ask her about things she's read--sometimes about the mechanisms that make bread rise and sometimes about why you should use a specific brand of oven mitt to take your bread out of the oven.

But my interest in knowledge goes beyond just bread questions. I ask my girlfriend (a biology major) about things like telomeres all the time. I ask my friend in nursing school about the spinal cord, I ask my friend in IT about bits and bytes.

I like hearing all of these things, they're all usually at least passingly interesting to me and I try to remember as much as I can about them.

This thirst for knowledge unfortunately sometimes lead me into doubts about my chosen discipline in school and what I want to do with my future. I love reading, and writing, and talking about literature. I even love learning and understanding the mechanics of the English language, and how they are similar or different than other languages. But literature doesn't deal in many hard facts. Even the mechanics of grammar are fluctuating things; they are more in flux now than ever before with the rapid, lose forms of written communication provided by the Internet and cellular phone texting. I have no doubt that within fifty years the difference between "your" and "you're" will be totally forgotten and "your" will be the only form of that word.

I'm serious, people will literally forget that "your" ever was "you're". Think it couldn't happen? When was the last time you said, "let us" instead of "let's". Do you even type "let's?" I bet you type "lets".

The lack of hard facts, though. It bothers me. Not because I demand that questions should have a straight answer. I love arguing about the interpretations of a story, of the actions of the characters in a book or play, what a poet felt when he wrote a stanza.

I worry, though, that this sort of thing doesn't actually help the world in any way.

I'm a big fan of science and all the amazing things that it has done for us as a species. Science and the scientific method has freed us from superstition and ignorance, given us insight into how the world works and helped us to understand how we can fit into it. So many times I'll look at the cold realities that science can show us and compare it to the ephemeral, shifting ideas about literature and language and fear I've wasted my time and energy learning more about iambic pentameter than protons.

Because, well, people don't read. I don't know if they ever really did, but now they certainly don't. All things need to be condensed into bite-sized morsels of information, preferably fitting onto an iPhone screen. Newser's motto is "Read Less, Know More." Can you read less and know more?

Maybe you can.

That's what fucks with my head so much, you see?

Sure, you can't be a scientist or a computer technician or a doctor without lots of reading, but that's not really reading, it's just studying. You're just drilling information into your mind for later retrieval. Reading literature isn't like that. Literature is a journey you take, seeing the sights the author has lain out for you and recalling them later to understand the story's meaning (or its lack of one.)

But what good does that do anyone? Why waste your time learning about Beowulf when you could be learning Oracle? I struggle so much with that question, and often cannot defend it, even to myself. I look at my friends and loved ones and see them all maturing into adults with jobs, careers even, using skills learned at schools where they had to deal with real things, computers or corpses or mechanical objects.

I struggle to even find the right way to explain my self-doubt and frustration and this problem.

I can't really explain why I love the study of literature and stories, some of them hundreds or thousands of years old. I can't explain it to myself and that's what scares me. Is it just because I'm good at it? Because I'm good at reading and that makes me feel good, feel superior to people in some way even if they know more about musical timing or mathematics or something? I don't know. I hope not.

The joke about liberal arts majors working at Starbucks or whatever is a stale one, but I fear it has a lot of truth built into its foundations. I literally know liberal arts majors who hold college degrees that to this day, as we push further into our late twenties, work, literally, at Starbucks.

Is this a problem with learning about art or music or literature instead of science or medicine?

Is it a problem with our society?

This is the only reason I can sometimes use to defend the "liberal" education to myself, sometimes. The society we live in is a very materialistic one. And I'm not a guy who uses terms like materialistic very often. Until I was maybe seventeen the only thing I thought of when I heard someone claim someone was "materialistic" was materia and I hoped they'd start casting spells around. But yeah, the materialism of our society is vast and permeates everything from school to jobs to entertainment.

So you know what? Fuck that.

Maybe studying literature won't cure cancer or find out how we can turn lead into gold (or rocks into gasoline I suppose) but there has to be more to life than those things. Science tells us that humans are just animals with highly evolved cognitive functions. We probably evolved the ability to predict the future to be better hunters and as a side effect became self-aware and were able to aspire to more than just chasing down an antelope or digging up some seeds. As far as we know we're the only beings in the entire universe with this power of total sapience. I'll grant some animals probably have self-awareness, but none of them have it at the same level as humans do.

So yeah, I think we do need the study of literature. Because stories tell us who we are. Science can give us the tools for our life, but the stories we tell give us the direction, and learning about those stories, learning to think about them and what they mean, will make us better people.

This is something that people have lost sight of as college becomes devalued by all the people attending like our parents did. They go to a university not for a "universal" education, which is what they system was created to provide, but instead for a skill and the promise of a better job. In the past people with college degrees would be hired for better jobs because the idea was that they had proven they were able to think and not just learn. That's what college is about, and not many things can teach you to think about things as a good argument about Hamlet can.

Okay so debate about nearly anything could lead to better thinking, but I think that arguing about whether or not Sooki should be considered a whore or a slut leads to less revelation than talking about stories crafted to have real meaning.

Colleges shift more and more into high schools, with a rote list of broad classes and perhaps a few more specific ones. Tests are standardized, multiple choice questions and thinking is downplayed for the fact that you're just here to learn what you need to learn before trying to get a better job. Eloquent communication is cast aside. People confuse the terms "their" "there" and "they're" and claim anyone correcting them is a grammar Nazi.

But how many of those people honestly don't know which of those words is the correct one? A shockingly large amount, I'd bet.

I feel like I'm rambling off onto a different subject here, so allow me to try and reign this all in with some sort of conclusion, even as my mind itself struggles with the argument I'm trying to make.

Studying literature makes people better. There. That's my claim, and I believe it. I think that people who study literature and read good stories and really try to understand and think about what they read will become better, smarter people. They can think, they can comprehend.

I once had a teacher who tried to teach me Latin. I don't know if I really retained much of the Latin (not because she was a bad teacher, she was one of the best teachers I've ever had--I was simply a terrible student) but I'll always remember a quote she told the class when we were talking about something similar to what I've been rambling on about in this blog post.

She told me that a person thinks about things, and an educated person thinks about ideas.

So, why don't you just think about that idea?