Human knowledge, dear reader, is a funny thing, and our pursuit of it is even funnier, especially when we are wearing flip-flops. We spend a large proportion of our waking hours trying to come to know things. And yet we never seem to know that we know something until we realize that, without knowing how or when, we have come to know it.
Let me offer an example, since I know that you are already starting to know that you always knew that guy was an idiot, you know? You are studying for an exam. If it is one of those irritating blue book exams with the identification questions — and it is, because I am in charge of this hypothesis, and I say it is — there is a good chance that you are going to have to learn something specific and sort-of-quantified: the basic chronology of the French Revolution, for example, or the subdivisions of the three parts of the first component of Wright's concept of an "emancipatory social science." For the uninitiated, these are: tidy, sandwich, probably not, superglam, spiffy and loaded with Monterey Jack and our famous Chipotle Ranch dressing. These vectors can, of course, be delineated institutionally and psychosexually, but not epistemologically, rendering them methodologically autonomous, but unable to get wireless signal in Continental Europe.
Anyway, you are up the night before the exam, fully loaded with coffee and sugar — and some other little helpers — and you're trying to memorize all this essential information. You try the age-old favorites: closing your eyes and reciting, covering up part of the page — or whatever its iPad equivalent is — perhaps some kind of faintly creepy mnemonic device. You do it, and then you look to find that you are missing two. You try again, and you get those two, but you've forgotten another one. And so on and so forth, until finally you get the whole list and can get back to Angry Birds. There is not an identifiable point at which the information sticks to your brain — one minute you do not know something, and the next minute you find you know it.
So far, so loaded with Monterey Jack. At this point, you do not know my point. Well, get ready to know it, for here it comes — I am about to leave for a short visit to my native England, and I am annoyed equally by the fact that the visit will coincide with the royal wedding and the fact that I shall miss the NFL draft. In one sentence, I have seriously damaged not one, but two perfectly good cultural stereotypes, and it stings.
This situation has just crept up on me like an aggressive same-sex kiss creeps up on the end of a Saturday Night Live sketch in lieu of a punch line. One minute, I was sniggering because someone said they liked my pants. The next, I was genuinely concerned about the prospect of the Redskins trying to stretch for a quarterback as the tenth pick in the draft. Once, I would have seen the occasion of a balding, inbred man marrying a tremendously uninteresting woman on television as the perfect setting for a drinking game : Drink every time Prince Philip leans over and visibly says something racist to the Queen. Now, all I can think is that it is going to be impossible to get a packet of crisps in a single pub in the land, which feels me with a deep foreboding.
What has this to do with you, dear and by-now-surely-completely-baffled-and-angrily-gassy reader? Well, since I have been contemplating the possibility finally of stepping outside the comfy confines of the college campus, I have noticed more and more the pressure upon us all to know and to define ourselves.
Career-getting manuals in particular seem to state that without being able neatly to summarize oneself — or, even more bizarrely, to identify oneself perfectly with one of the personality types on page 68 — we are doomed to a life of professional misery. One is either an extrovert or an introvert, a thinker or a feeler — despite the fact that the healthy way through life usually requires moving between these poles as the situation requires. And the one person I've ever met who could be described only as a "feeler" made himself very unpopular, especially with the ladies.
My point, then, is that in the search for careers and concentrations, internships, relationships and cruise ships, we cannot know what we are and therefore what we need to do. The best one can do is to make an educated guess and be sure that anyone nearby who instead makes a guesstimate receives a swift knee to the groin.
