Know-it-All

Typical Cunningham library item

A strong memory from youth was the sickening feeling when I looked at the clock and realized that the library was closed, and I had a homework assignment due the next day involving research. That Battle of the Bulge paper was not going to write itself, and my family was not known for its wealth of great resource materials just laying around the house. Indeed, the only Battle of the Bulge info available to me was contained in a "Woman's Day" article about diet tips. Our sole set of encyclopedias came from a great-aunt who had passed away, leaving us her mouldering volumes of World Book that PREDATED WWII (see “Battle of the Bulge” above).

I think of this every time I search for something on my laptop or phone. The answers come before I have even mentally formed the questions. While most of the time I take this totally for granted, once in a while I reflect on this seismic shift in the acquisition of information since my girlhood. My smart-alecky persona back in the day led to my being called Nicky Know-it-All by my father (and that was NOT a compliment). Now, everyone knows it all, or can find it all in a twinkling.

The Internet Age has led to changes in the way we think, and process. Memorization of facts has, in large part, gone by the board. I notice this teaching Confirmation class at church. There is precious little the young teens can rattle off from sheer recall, without the aid of electronic devices, including the Apostles Creed, the 10 Commandments and, often, the Lord’s Prayer. I tell them that learning some stuff by heart is a great thing (I use the story of driving in an ice storm; repeating “Hail Mary’s” over and over is, I’m convinced, what got me safely home), but I don’t think they buy it.

In addition to a boatload o’ prayers, I can also recite (from memory) a good number of poems (some gems, others? Well, let’s just say I know every clunking stanza of Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees”). In conversation, it’s impressive to sprinkle the chat with quotations, whether or not they are pertinent to the subject at hand. When someone tells me they resent the high cost of pumpkin spice lattes at Starbucks, I reply sagely, “As Nelson Mandela famously put it, ‘Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.’ ” (Wrong kind of resentment. Plus it implies that pumpkin spice lattes are poisonous. Also I’m not 100% sure that’s a quote from Nelson Mandela. It might be Reese Witherspoon.)

So here we are, in a world where we are simultaneously idiots and geniuses. We don’t know much about history (as Sam Cooke warbled), but we can locate it instantly. And as I mourn the loss of a certain kind of learning, I recognize the value of another: expertly navigating the ever-expanding tidal wave of knowledge.

Which sure beats settling for diet tips from "Woman’s Day."

BIG improvement!!