High Definition Living: An Approach to Knowledge

The older I get the more I realize that time and nature is happening also to me: I don't hear quite as well as I used to hear and my vision isn't as sharp as previously. While some people go to their graves "with eye undimmed" (indeed the phrase "his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated" is from the Bible--it is used to describe Moses' good death in Deut. 34: 7), I am afraid I will not be one of them. Yet, I seem to have discovered in the last few years something that is true about me--that my mind works now with high-definition clarity, and this clarity enables me to "see" and understand far more than I used to be able to see. The purpose of this essay is to reflect on this gift that seems to be opening to me the older I get. First, a word of introduction.

I. "Older" Adults and Learning Theory

Contrary to what my kids my think, I don't consider myself an "older" adult. But I may get there some day. It seems to me from what I have picked up here and there that learning theorists have it all wrong with respect to older adults. They say we can't learn languages (or we will learn them with an accent); we learn more slowly; we don't remember as well, etc. etc. I don't know what all they say about older adults, but it generally isn't too positive. But, I want to state for the record, that it is my experience that as I get older my ability to learn increases, that my retention is augmented, that my eagerness to learn grows, and that the depth and amount of information I can take in has tremendously increased. These 3100 essays written in 4 years (the equivalent of one 200 to 240 page book per month), are living proof, I hope, that some deeper power of learning and expression has come to the fore in me in these years. I don't take "credit" for it; indeed, I am a bit startled by it, too. But there it is. And I have taken the time and expended the effort to do this.

As I think of what I have been able to do in the last four years, I would say it is a result of what I call the development of a "High-Definition Intellectual Sense." It may be especially strong in me now because of years of deprivation and intermittent expression, but there are a few things I can say about it.

II. High-Definition Senses and Knowledge

I have always been a person interested in knowledge acquisition. Indeed, the Oregon State Bar Bulletin just published an article on me in which it called me a "polymath." Nice. It is their term, but, come to think of it, I may have handed it to them. In any case, my mind is now on overdrive in the acquisition of bundles of individual pieces of information as well as the means of relating these pieces of information to each other. For much of my life I likened my intellectual quest, truncated as it was by the pressures of family, work and misplaced ambitions, to a brickmaker who would turn out thousands of bricks but then leave them strewn on the ground all around him. I wanted to build a skyscraper or some kind of exquisitely ornate building, but all the building materials, I felt, were lying on the ground. There was no grout, no forms for the material to climb into heaven, no architect's plans, no scaffolding, no nothing. Just a huge pile of beautiful but rather useless bricks lying around me.

Yet, I don't feel that is true anymore. For some reason the knowledge that I gathered in the past has largely stayed with me, and now I have the time and means to express this knowledge. So, it is as if I am now able to point to a pile of apparent rubble in my life, isolate the precise brick that I want and put it in a rapidly rising high-rise. Or, to put it differently, I can both create new bricks and assemble them into a superstructure at the same time. This arises out of a heightened sense of knowledge that I now now. I can draw on a deep well of images, a varied and detailed store of knowledge that is now more like a huge storage facility than a series of bricks lying around me. Now it is as if I can go into a huge facility, much bigger than any of our "box retailers" and go to a particular department, bring out those fork lifts, go exactly where I need to go, pluck the piece of knowledge I want, bring it down, and then assemble it into an accessible and, I hope, challenging and instructive essay. So, if you want to imagine my intellectual life now, liken it to something ten times bigger than an Amazon.com facility--where all the books are stored. Of course it is not identical to that--but that is the image I am working on..

III. A Writing Facility

As part of this high-definition intellectual life I am now living, I have discovered a new facility in writing which allows me to break certain scholarly conventions even as I am more satisfied with what I write than ever before. Scholarly conventions tell you to keep the "I" out of your writing. People want the facts; the truth of the phenomenon. Sure. I will give those to you, but I will give it to you filtered through personality. That is what everyone does anyway, so why not admit that at least this is what is happening in part? And, as I have become more free in my writing, I have (re)discovered humor as a category of my writing. That doesn't mean that I am a "humorist," or that every essay should be examined for its humorous content. Rather, it means that if I have something funny to say, either by way of ridicule of someone or myself, I will probably say it. People are more apt to be persuaded by something you or I say if they are in a frame of mind to receive it. Humor tends to relax people, to make them more attentive and even receptive to what they are reading/hearing. It is also something that I have in abundance. So, why not use it? I once asked a judge if there is any humor in the law. He, taken aback by my questions, immediately said, "No." I just smiled at him. There may not be too much irony or humor in statutes, but wherever there are people, you have humor. Indeed, Jesus would probably have been more right if he had said, "Wherever you have two or three gathered in my name, there you have humor."

IV. Confidence

One of the things that held me back for years in my writing is that I felt I had to get "permission" from senior colleagues or more experienced colleagues regarding the "type" of writing that "counted." I think this is probably a pretty common phenomenon in law and academic inquiry for younger people--in your 20s, 30s and even 40s. You want approval from those in the field who have accomplished something, and the way you do it is to write like they did. Indeed, even today there are various indicia of "scholarly productivity" that are published--relating to books, articles, grants received, etc. My email-alumni magazine from Brown University, which I just received yesterday, for example, perpetuates this by showing how the Brown faculty "measures up" on someone else's "productivity index." It is the sophisticated equivalent of US News & World Reports ranking system.

But as I began to write more and more in the way that "fit me," in a way that gave full expression to my "high-definition" learning style, I began to care less and less what the "experts" might say. Surely I make use of some of their work but, as I develop my own way of doing things, I see the stark deficiencies in most of their work. Most of them can't explain themselves well, or they assume all kinds of things that are not brought into evidence. Thus, I can benefit from the knowledge they communicate, but I have no illusion that what they do is necessarily the way to do it. It is just the way that some people think it should be done today. Indeed, if you read scholarly literature of even a century ago, it looks very different from that today--especially in the scholary "apparatus"--footnotes, etc.

Conclusion

I think I will always care what people say about me and my work. I am not so much of a sociopath or indifferent person that I will "dismiss" what people say. However, by becoming more confident and expressive in the various fields of which I know something, I become less beholden to (or even interested in) what others might say about my writing. I write for them, and others, to be sure. But, even more, I think I am writing for myself. And, friends, the music is great...

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