Reading an Encyclopedia

I have never been enamored with the idea of reading the encyclopedia.  As a child, I remember hearing about people who read encyclopedias and the general assumption was that anyone who did that must be really smart and know a lot, but nonetheless, despite my aspirations to be smart and knowledgeable, I was never really tempted to sit down with an encyclopedia and read it.  One of my favorite book series when I was young was Encyclopedia Brown, and yet, despite the fact that I wanted to be as smart as Encyclopedia Brown, I never took up the task of becoming Encyclopedia Jimmy.  (By the way, my kids always laugh when they hear that I was Jimmy when young—I am not sure why Jimmy is such a funny name to them, but Jim seems normal.)  We even owned an encyclopedia (The World Book), which I remember using for an assorted paper now and then and I remember putting all the update stickers in the volumes as the year-in-review volumes came out (if you had a World Book, you know what that means—if you didn’t, then that makes no sense, and trust me, it isn’t worth explaining).  But, I was never tempted to actually read an entry in the encyclopedia for fun, let alone the whole thing.  There was a recent book, reviewed somewhere in these here archives (should I start linking to my own blog posts when this happens?  That seems self-indulgent, which is an odd thing about which to be concerned in a purely self-indulgent blog, so I guess, truth be told, it just seems like work to link to older posts, so I don’t want to bother.  But, maybe it would build character if I did that.  (Come to think of it, it would be like pasting in all those update stickers in the encyclopedia set.)), telling about a guy who read the Encyclopedia, and the book was silly and easy and amusing, but it didn’t make me want to read an encyclopedia.  Now that I think about it, the idea of reading an encyclopedia is obsolete—is it even possible to read Wikipedia from beginning to end?

All of this is prelude to a confession.  I just read a book which, when you get to the heart of the matter,  gave the experience of reading a glorified encyclopedia.  Well, technically, it was somewhere between an encyclopedia and a textbook.  (Textbooks are just encyclopedias in which the entries are not ordered alphabetically and which don’t have an entry about asparagus.  They are just as much fun to read.)

Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order is a history of Western Civilization from Athens and Jerusalem through Rome and London to Philadelphia.  As a work of erudition it is impressive.  Kirk knows a lot.  As he marches along, every single stopping point is a model of concision and information provision.  You want to know about Augustine or the Magna Carta?—you could read Wikipedia or the passages in Kirk and I daresay, you will learn more in less time by reading Kirk than by reading an encyclopedia entry.  Considered in terms of knowledge per page, his book is stunningly great.

But, knowledge per page is not the only criterion of a book.  Is it readable?  Well, surprisingly so.  Kirk writes extremely well.  Sentence by sentence it is finely crafted, with little wasted verbiage.  Kirk can make a point via an indirection which is nothing short of admirable.  Consider:

A freshman once informed me that we have no need nowadays for the beliefs and institutions of yesteryear: he himself, he said, could outline a better moral system and a better political pattern than those we have inherited.  I asked him if he could build a gasoline engine, say, without reference to anything mechanical now existing.

Brilliant.  As Kirk goes on to note, building a moral cultural order is, of course, a little more challenging than building a gasoline engine.

And yet, despite this book’s manifold virtues, I felt like I was just wading through it.  There is a vast amount of detail here, I learned a lot, but the book is oddly bloodless.  For example, Kirk has a section taking down Locke, and yet there was no thrill of the kill.  It was all so much reporting.  I had the same experience in the other Kirk book I once read: The Conservative Mind.  It too was a book full of knowledge, but the book itself felt like reading just so many entries in an encyclopedia of Conservative thinkers.

It’s an odd problem.  Here we have someone who can write well—he even wrote fiction (ghost stories, of all things)—who knows as much as any human could possibly know, and yet whose books lack a certain joie de vivre.  Well, I have only read two of his books—maybe I just stumbled upon the wrong two.

I read the book with my tutorial this year.  The  students who read the most in it only made it about half-way through.  They liked it, but they seemed to suffer from the same problem I had—it was a book which was all too easy to put down and not all that easy to pick up again.  I made it through mostly because I knew I was leading a tutorial on it and I am the type of person who spends lots of time just working my way through books.  But, if my students are an indication, this book gets far less readership than the content merits.

This is all oddly very unsatisfying to me; I need to read more Kirk.