That little metal spring turns two pieces of inert wood into a clever device with a thousand uses. I appreciate that someone—some person—once figured it out.
Amphidrome. It’s an obscure word describing a point in the ocean where there is no range between high and low tide; a neutral zone, so to speak. There are currents at an amphidromic point, but tidal forces are effectively zilch.
I’m not likely to visit one of these places on Earth, but then I’m also not likely to visit any of the Apollo landing zones on the Moon either. They exist; I am not there. But I like to know about them, just like events in history that I’ll never be able to visit either. (Think about that for a moment.)
The first and last note in a musical scale is called the tonic. Lemon juice will erode a marble kitchen counter if the marble isn’t properly sealed. Stare decisis not only means that legal precedent should matter, but it also cautions modern societies not to get stuck simply because things have always been done a particular way.
These are things I remember, and things I also like to remember. But here’s what they are not, at least to me. They are not trivia.
Trivia are like scraps of paper stuck amid books on a shelf. They amount to little, no matter how many scraps may get piled up. Random information rarely amounts to much beyond a means to win a bet, or the occasional surprise that solves an unexpected problem. The stuff I’m describing here concerns the muscles and mass that makes the world, from lowly springs that keep clothespin jaws tight to grand expressions of magnetic fusion containment systems to the way that painters mix egg yolk with pigments to achieve the unique glow that only tempera paint can provide.
I will not remember all of these things, or at least not all the details that make them live and breathe. I hang on to some, but most things continually feel at risk of disappearing into the gray mists of fading memory. I don’t need to share them with people; they are not for public display like a well-practiced bar trick. They are also not data I need to demonstrate erudition, or coolness, or even efficiency in recall. They matter to me because they’re interesting, and having these bits of working knowledge empowers me to be more fully engaged. But often I discover they don’t last.
Nothing lasts.
Some of these things concern bits of information that simply interest me, or amuse me, or remind me of experiences and feelings. More meaningfully, some of these bits connect to other bits, and taken together their various components become greater than the sum of their parts. There’s a pleasure to understanding how the world interoperates. I enjoy a deeper appreciation for both ordinary things and extraordinary things when I can draw connections to provenance or even precedence. At a smaller scale, I derive a pleasing sense that approximates security coming from the knowledge of how to prepare the ground for planting tomatoes, or why newspaper copy written in the 20th century often ended with the number “30” before being sent off for typesetting. I like understanding why rocket trajectories tend to curve as they ascend to orbit, and I like understanding how single-point perspective creates the illusion of depth in renaissance paintings.
Language, especially in its ineffable way of absorbing phrases and expressions from other languages, presents extensive challenges and pleasures to pursue. I rarely refer to my rivals as bête noire, and the private story of my life hardly ever rings in my own ears as a bildungsroman. But when I see these terms in texts, I derive a richness in privately feeling more intimately part of the conversation when the terms resonate easily.
One of the reasons these fragments of disembodied data don’t last is that there are just more things to know than any one person can ever hope to remember. If memory is partially a function of repetition and association, it’s harder to access information that exists without much context, or at least regular use. Where a doctor may use the specialized nomenclature of blood chemistry every day, I generally do not, which means that kind of medical information doesn’t stick as easily. That’s obviously true for anything in the world, from the specialized language used in commercial aviation, to the arcane language of economic theory, to the strangely baroque argot of American football commentary (for which, I confess, I often need a translator if I’m obliged to watch for one reason or another).
I’m aware that some of this information isn’t vitally important. It is entirely possible to go through an entire day, or even an entire lifetime, without knowing the music of Aleksandr Scriabin, or how a gear differential transmits equivalent power to two wheels that may be traveling different length paths. Taken to extremes, it’s possible to go through life without reading a book, even as it troubles me to know so many people who make just such a choice.
One might assert that art itself is not critically important to any given moment in life. It neither provides shelter, nor sustenance, nor companionship when the wolves begin to circle as night encroaches. But then perhaps that’s why art matters so much. It is the reason to preserve life in the first place, to fortify our shelters and our camp, to share sustenance with others around the fire. Art is the reason we exist. We exist to create; creation becomes the over arching beauty worth pursuing in a finite life; beauty is the reason to endure.
Which leads me back to trying to hang on to things that matter to me. While I am not suddenly compelled to listen intently to every piece of music Leoš Janáček composed, I value knowing how his moody musical ruminations influenced others. Stories about how Borscht Belt nightclubs influenced wider American culture not only make me smile, but make me nostalgic, even wistful that I cannot travel through time. I consider it vital to be able to cook a bunch of things without a cookbook, and I also consider it vital to be able to follow the big picture of endlessly dynamic global markets. While it’s unlikely I’ll be obliged to describe the difference between arabica and robusta coffee beans, I like knowing the difference when I brew a morning cup. (Although on this point, trust me: go with arabica every time.)
What matters to me is being in touch with the world, feeling it like a participant and not simply an observer. That means appreciating that everything known was first learned by someone who spent the time and energy to learn it, to experience it for the first time, and to give it a name. When I’m gone in a few years, everything I’ve learned about everything they’ve learned will disappear with me, except for the very, very few traces of my life that might have just a microscopic chance of enduring for a few years beyond my time. Rather than convince me of my futility, that impermanence reminds me to stay engaged, to hang on, and try to remember.