Pre-Learning

When I picked a major my second semester of college, I could describe what I was going to learn. I didn’t actually know any of it yet, but the major gave clear language about what it was going to teach. Mine was a particularly strong case because there was a sequence of required classes for the next two years: I’d close-read the political philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx, Weber, and Nietzsche. At the end of it I’d somewhat understand what they had to say. There aren’t really any shortcuts for that kind of learning; no matter how clearly you can see the goal, you still have to take the time to get there. But you can still characterize what you’ll learn in advance, with enough precision that basically anyone can understand what you mean.

I’ve been thinking about this because I suspect I am very often in the same relation to knowledge that I was in the middle of freshman year: I can see what I’d like to learn, but I haven’t yet learned it. I recently started a Babbel course for German. I don’t know German, but I know that if I stick with the course for a half hour a day for a year, I’ll know a decent amount of words, grammar, and sounds.

It’s the same with my reading list. I don’t know the poetry of Philip Larkin, but I know I will, and I know he fits in mid 20th century modernity. I don’t know much of anything about state formation, but I have some idea about which readings will teach me. Same for Islam, India, Urdu, classical antiquity, English poetry…So why haven’t I done them yet?

Part of the answer is that I am! I’m reading maybe 40 books a year, plus an endless scrolling stream of scholarly and popular articles and essays. I just can’t move fast enough; I probably have 600 books on my reading list at this point. 15 years!

But those reading lists aren’t fixed; they change depending on what I’m interested in. They change faster than I can read them. And what I’m interested in – and really, what I can imagine myself learning – depends on circumstances. This is, I suspect, part of what’s made upheavals and career choices so wrenching. Leaving India meant leaving my friends, job, favorite parks and restaurants, but also the chance to live in a context where Rabindranath Tagore matters to my peers, where drilling myself on Hindi vocabulary is a rational choice, where people can talk to me about the histories of ancient India I bought and want to read. If I’m not regularly visiting cities with Hindi signage everywhere, or eating lunch with people who love Urdu poetry, well – it’s so much harder, too hard, really, to learn all that stuff. Instead I’ll learn about Wagner, since that’s what I have on hand in DC. In DC I’ll learn about Lincoln, Washington, Episcopalianism, USAID, Shakespeare and immigration. But to make time for that, and accept that those are the directions I want to walk in, I’ve got to accept that everything I planned to learn in India I won’t, and new areas are embodied, lively, worth studying in my new home. Different questions and answers circulate in each social field I plant myself. And moving from one to another means giving up a whole future self I had imagined, one who knows the map of India in detail, the languages, places, literature and history. I look back and I see a whole lot of projects I outlined and never fully learned: Islamic political thought; medieval political thought; African political history; Indian history; Indian political thought; Russian language; even attaining an advanced level of French. I look at my bookshelves and they feel like testaments to things that are now so much harder to learn than back when I was in places where they seemed so important.