As a reasonably bright child raised by people who valued intelligence, perhaps to a fault, I spent much of my early life thinking I was smart. The most valuable revelation of my adulthood was the simple idea that I don’t know everything… or, indeed, very much at all.
Some little things I learned this week which overturn what I thought I knew:
- It’s Sir Walter Ralegh, not Sir Walter Raleigh. Oh, I see. I learned to spell it from a children’s book at age 8 or so, and never investigated further, apparently assuming (without much thought) that all those historians and art historians were, what, making typos?
- baleful means menacing or hostile, not sorrowful or miserable. Apparently, I’ve been using its obsolete meaning my entire life.
- Christopher Marlowe wrote The Passionate Shepherd to his Love, not John Donne. I suspect that, somewhere around age 12 or so, I confounded one poem with another, and never bothered to straighten it out.
In the words of The Fella, “Yay! You’re smarter now!” And he’s right… but the exposure of little-but-big lifelong misapprehensions fills me with a healthy mistrust of other things I think I’ve learned.
Which is all to the good, I think. It’s wise to be skeptical of one’s own knowledge. That much I have learned.