The Know-It-All

This is a book that I found at the teacher’s yard sale at the end of the year (so that we could lighten our loads when moving across the world) on the free table. I only had a few weeks left, but I was confident that I could squeeze in another good book.

The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World
A. J. Jacobs

This is exactly my type of book. I mean, I do love fiction, comedy, romance, etc, but I do really love reading funny, non-fiction books (enter my obsession with anything penned by Bill Bryson). This is the story of an editor at Esquire who decides that he wants to read the entire Encyclopaedia Brittanica. The book is organized into chapters for each letter of the alphabet. In each chapter, Jacobs has bold words as headings and the paragraphs that follow offer up anecdotes, definitions, and fun facts from the encyclopedia as well as the occasional thread of his autobiography.

I loved reading the encyclopedic things that he chose to share in addition to following along with his personal experience at the time of reading the book. I also really liked that as he read the book, Jacobs encountered several different sentences, phrases, or ideas that he found inspiring or wise. A few that I could easily retrieve and summarize, thanks to his “wisdom” entry in the index, in order as I encountered them in the book:

[My summaries in text, his words in quotes.]

A poem by John Dyer in 1699: A little rule, a little sway/a sunbeam in a winter’s day/is all the proud and mighty have/between the cradle and the grave. “On the one hand, it’s a wisely humbling poem... But on the other hand, the verse plays to my cynical side, the whatever-you-do-doesn’t-matter-because-you’ll-eventually-die side.”

“Ecclesiastes offers exactly the correct reaction to [the fact that life is desperately, insanely, absurdly unfair]. There’s nothing to be done about it, so enjoy what you can. Take pleasure in the small thing.”

Jacobs tells the story of a told to him by a lawyer friend about a Middle Eastern potentate who gathered the wise men in his kingdom to assimilate all the knowledge into a book for his sons to read and then kept sending the wise men back to write a shorter book until finally the wise men returned and gave a single sentence: This too shall pass.

Flaubert says that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing because you can’t learn the secrets to life from a textbook. 

“In his final speech, [Horace Mann] told students: ‘Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.’ Good wisdom. Great wisdom even. I have to remember that.”

Jacobs describes meeting with a rabbi to discuss some of his issues with Judaism and talks to him about scholarship in Judaism. The rabbi says that scholarship is ‘more than an ethical good… it’s a tool for survival. The emphasis on telling a story – that’s one way to express yourself Jewishly.’ When Jacobs brings up Ecclesiasted, the rabbi says that ‘we shouldn’t be focused on the competing of a task. When you’re going from A to Z, if you make it to Z, great. But if you don’t, it doesn’t mean you’re a failure.’ 

A quote from the Tolstoy entry: ‘Stiva [from Anna Karenina] though never wishing ill, wastes resources, neglects his family, and regards pleasure as the purpose of life. The figure of Stiva is perhaps designed to suggest that evil, no less than good, derives from the small moral choices human beings make moment by moment.’