When I named my first blog (a little over four years ago--yikes) I rather solemnly subtitled it "A little learning is a dangerous thing", probably thinking romantically about how emancipatory knowledge and education could be for those who just needed a little bit of learning to break free. At the time, I believed my year spent abroad would be similar, even though I was the literally the opposite of oppressed at home (note: my parents have always and continue to be incredibly supportive of everything my brothers and I want to do. That one fact led me straight to the UK, actually). Including that line, however, was a tongue-in-cheek way of acknowledging that the grand backpacking tour I was about to embark on would give me some sort of alternative way of seeing the world.
Except, fast forward a few years to a few months ago, when I check out my now-archived travel blog after months of forgetting about it, and glance at the subtitle. It was like reading it for the first time. When I saw it again, I suddenly realized (much like those thunderbolt moments when something you've never considered suddenly makes a ton of sense, like, for example, suddenly noticing that in 'I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus', the kid's dad is Santa. Unbelievable) that what I'd typed four years ago was intended as exactly the opposite of what I meant it to be.
When Alexander Pope wrote that line in his poem An Essay On Criticism (1711), he was criticizing those who had a little knowledge of something and then acted like experts on the subject. With the hindsight of four years of travelling and further education, not only did I see the actual meaning of the phrase, but with a sinking feeling, recognized the signs of it in myself. There are some things that I do believe I have a deep knowledge of, thanks to formal and extended education (like film, for example, or the entire Harry Potter series...yes, years of deep research, mmhmm), but there is so much more that I have only a glancing and inconsistent framework for. Yet, like a lot of people, I still feel free to opine on and act like a guru about subjects I hardly know. It's easy to blame the Internet age and its in-many-ways wonderful
tools, like Wikipedia or online newspapers, for an inconsistent and
thumbnail-sized understanding of the world's issues. But I really do
think it's important to acknowledge when your experience doesn't match
your purported mastery of something. And when I noticed Pope's original meaning, I knew I wanted to change its alarming correctness in describing well, me.
And so, with that in mind, it's time to choose a path, much like I did when I moved to England for what turned out to be two years in total. Luckily, the phrase did come true for me the way I expected during my time there. 'A little learning' turned into 'a ton' fairly quickly. But now that I'm back, I know what I want is to truly know and deeply understand the craft of writing, rather than just know bits of a wildly varied array of arbitrary things (though there's definitely a place for that, too. I'm a massive trivia fan for that very reason).
This blog will be my record of how exactly I go about it and what I'm thinking and discovering along the way. If you want to join the discussion (and please do!) feel free to comment here or follow me on Twitter and tweet me there @gennellesmith!
