Comments on: Manvotional: The Know-It-All State of Mind

By: jerry

jerry — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 15:58:27 +0000

I think I suspect the ramblings of any man when he ends his written rambling with a cutesie face.

By: chris

chris — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 16:08:13 +0000

I really love this. The piece is not at all about knowledge , as such. I think DHL is referring to our sense of wonder more than anything. We can know and understand the most amazing facts about the universe. Breathtaking discoveries, even in the 1920′s, lacked the power to take ones breath away.. The latest discoveries, however extraordinary, fail to move or produce any reaction at all in us. We are somehow more dead to the experience of the world and life itself. than our forebears. Our forebears would be attuned to the wonderment of nature and could read the world for themselves and be joyous about discovering things through their own observations and conversations. When did you last hear a bird sing…or pause to listen to its song when you heard it? Our great grandfathers would know all about the bird from its singing and be able to mimic it, even. It would have had a significance for them that would be lost to us.today.
A lantern slide show would have been, the pinnacle of technology at some stage -. an awesome device that had the potential to change the world, Please don’t laugh at its clumsy size and primitiveness .(A laptop serves exactly the same purpose, The television was often referred to by my father as ‘the village idiot’s lantern’.). If the world survives another three generations we will all look comparatively like cavemen, . But as I said earlier, this essay is not about knowledge so much as our reaction to and connection with life and the world we live in.
I book my vacation in a four star hotel in some paradise and spend three months in Africa and have a marvelous time without having to step out of the hotel or the safari bus. Cosseted with all manner of comforts like air con., running water and abundant food I return home with a worse ignorance than I left home with,simply because I saw none of the struggle and poverty that was only a couple of blocks away.from the hotel. What was shocking or astonishing to our great grandfathers leaves the modern man unmoved and arouses not the slightest curiosity. Lawrence was writing about the universal deadness that afflicts humanity. TS Eliot offers much the same view of how we are disconnected from not only nature but our own natures, the Earth and the divine.. We are so blase and arrogant – simply above it all. The wind and weather doesn’t bother us unduly. Food exists in shops that are always overstocked with everything we could want. It would look seriously different if electricity failed for a few weeks – and then we would realise that we are.actually quite puny in the face of the icy blasts that reality would throw at us. The churches would be full once more to overflowing.
Maybe add some T S Eliot to your reading list as he is on a parallel track with DH Lawrence here – The Four Quartets or The Wasteland.
In fact, ask yourself when was the last time you were truly moved by something that induced in you a sense of awe and wonderment in being alive?

By: Xenophon

Xenophon — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 00:34:50 +0000

The first evidence of this type of reasoning, so far as I have experienced, is in Plato’s Socratic dialog The Phadeo. Here he argues that the new knowledge gained from books and education was inferior to direct experience. Mankind has been steadily going downhill since then as more perceptive thinkers, like Lawrence and Plato, point out that we are simply not up to understanding the world through our books and, for Lawrence, even direct experience. Fortunately, reality isn’t dualistic – there isn’t a ‘deeper reality’ – and what I experience I really truly experience, and though superficial, gets me by. Lawrence was simply another gnostic, and as flawed in his reasoning.

By: Brett McKay

Brett McKay — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 20:58:24 +0000

@Mattoomba-

Actually, quotations marks around a title indicate an essay. If “New Mexico,” had been an anthology, the title would have been italicized. So if you’re going to be putting on intellectual airs, and then say there’s no indication that this selection came from a larger work, as Nobby did, I will give just a bit of a snarky response in return. Although I wouldn’t classify it as such–more like irritation. As someone who loves plain talk, I’ve never understood the need to adopt a cute tone like that. So poor Nobby touched on one of my personal pet peeves. But maybe that’s the DH Lawrence effect Virginia mentions above! And of course everyone has different style preferences–one man’s irritating acerbity is another’s light-hearted romp.

By: VirginiaFellow

VirginiaFellow — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 20:07:33 +0000

I’ve been reading this site for a while and love most everything you guys post here. The problem with DH Lawrence, for me, is that when people discuss his work they start writing like him. The same thing happens with Bukowski. I was never a big fan of Lawrence’s writing though I do like some of the things he has to say. I guess that’s my problem with 20th century English literature in general.

Concerning this article I think that it’s important to note that depth of experience is a very subjective thing. I do not travel much on the surface of the earth but I do walk to work each day. On my walk I am aware of the world around me – the birds, the trees, what flowers have bloomed that were not open yesterday, the same people I see on a daily basis and where on my walk I see them. I wonder where they are going, what job they work, how the landscape will change when the property for sale is developed, etc. I work with computer technology all day, I am a child of the internet (I’m in my mid thirties), and I do not own a television. I embrace digital media and all of the information it can give me, but I also know enough when to say when.

The world is always changing. He wrote that essay more than 80 years ago and felt overwhelmed by the world’s progress. Though, to be fair, he was English.

By: mattoomba

mattoomba — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 19:29:09 +0000

This was a great post. And, unlike others, I completely appreciated Nobbynob’s questions. Was he acerbic? Perhaps; but it struck me as light-hearted and good-natured…and he was just as self-deprecating as he was Lawrence-deprecating. His post helped me appreciate the original text all the more.

And no need to be overly sensitive to him, or worry about prepositional accuracy. Sure it was “From ‘New Mexico’”, but that could’ve been the name of an anthology, of which this piece could’ve been an isolated essay. The fact that this piece was an excerpt from a larger work could have been relevant; No need to get snarky about the “From” accuracy. That said, the piece is pretty powerful on its own.

And thanks to Eric, for his quotes of relevance as well.

By: Eric

Eric — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 18:40:53 +0000

I was having this discussing with my wife the other day, in relation to magic tricks. When I was growing up, pre-internet but not so very long ago, a good magic trick left you wondering if maybe, just maybe, there was real magic at work. Sure, you probably knew a few card tricks and maybe had one of those little plastic boxes that allowed you to perform the “drive a nail through a penny” trick, but a professional magician would leave you with a wondrous feeling that maybe you had just seen something that defied nature, or interected with nature in some privelaged way.

Nowadays, even the youngest kids just automatically assume there is a technical answer to any magic trick they see. It may be a cool experience, but there is nothing transcendental about it. The answer is only a google search away.

Now, I’m not so much of an old codger as to say this is some horrible thing that is killing the soul of our society. I love knowledge. But this is a new dynamic, and it is changing the way we approach the accumulation of knowledge, for better or for worse, or perhaps a bit of both. At any rate, it has motivated me to work harder with my daughter to teach her to let herself be surprised from time to time, to not look up the answer to every riddle on the internet, to not sneek a peak at your Christmas presents before it is time to open them, and to not google the plot spoilers of movies you haven’t seen and books you haven’t read.

Anyway, great discussion. Here are two of my favorite quotes on the subject:

“Real curiosity now gets little chance to develop — it’s smothered with information before it can draw a natural breath.” –Larry McMurtry

“We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that a savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.” –Mark Twain

By: Ask A Nice Guy

Ask A Nice Guy — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 18:15:04 +0000

Nice post.

To me, this read cautions users of arrogance and of being too boastful. Too many are out there readily and willing to show what they’ve done and will do. But if we only watch carefully, their accomplishments might be exaggerated or worse, their bar of success is set mightily low.

Learning doesn’t finish when we’ve closed a book. It’s important to know this one fact: That learning never ends.

Perhaps it is better to be an unassuming man who radiates — not talks — confidence; who displays strength, who carries power within himself with ease and defines the very word of manliness.

By: Bradley Ashby

Bradley Ashby — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 16:05:06 +0000

What I see here is Mr. Nobby demonstrating how the idea of vertical knowledge can, when taken to the extreme, can be just as bad as only having horizontal knowledge. This excerpt encourages delving into things more, despite the temptation to skim across the surface of life. Since this was written in 1929, some things are going to be dated, or out of context a little, no matter how much of the source we read. While the references to village school rooms are 80 years old, the idea can still be young and fresh.

The mistake, then, was to dive into each paragraph and sentece far too deeply. Mr. Nobby here seems to have lost the forest for the trees. Where he seems to see a call to cut back on education, I see an example set forth to provide illustration of how a narrower focus can increase the depth of experiecne.

The fact that focusing on a narrower field provides deeper knowledge really can’t be disputed, just look at all the myriad of medical fields. No longer is the title of “doctor” enough to cure any ailments, there are 55+ specialty fields. And even those specialists have a hard time keeping up with changes in their fields. However, I think this excerpt (or what I take away from it, which is honestly more important; one’s own interpretation) is more about gaining experience as opposed to knowledge. It’s just that when we think we know all there is about a subject, we lose the opportunities for experiencing more about it. It’s not our actual knowledge that gets in the way: it’s our assumption of knowledge.

Once you’ve decided there’s nothing new under the sun, there won’t be. Not for you, not once you’re so sure. And it would be sad to miss out on everything the world has to offer.

By: Brett McKay

Brett McKay — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 15:00:28 +0000

@Joe-

Only the response after your name is directed at you, of course. You can find the selection in a variety of places:

The most accurate place is in the book:

Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of DH Lawrence.

If you’d like to read the essay online, this book has a few variations from the original but will let you do that:

http://books.google.com/books?id=YxmAmXA-SPQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=dh+lawrence+tony+hillerman&hl=en&ei=Y5oITpTdJsTu0gHP5cH3Cg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=dh%20lawrence%20tony%20hillerman&f=false