Where Has All My Learning Gone?

As I write, I am scanning fourteen feet of bookshelves, books collected over more than 60 years. By no means are these all the books I have owned. There are more books in the living room, and multiple moves forced me to abandon many feet of bookshelf space. I once tossed out, for example, a whole row of science fiction novels purchased when I belonged to a sci fi book club. 

Many of the books on my shelves are full of underlines, asterisks, exclamation points, and usually indecipherable margin comments. They remind me that I have spent much of my life learning and thinking, even though my work time mainly involved talking and doing. When I retired twenty-five months ago, after 50+ years in the nonprofit world, I decided to put some order into decades of learning and thinking, to clean my conceptual house so to speak. My books tangibly reflect the many years of mental activity that yearn for coherence

Standing in front of my bookshelves today, I slowly run my fingers over the titles of books I have read, and sometimes loved. I feel sadly possessive. If you randomly pulled a book from my shelves, I would be hard pressed to tell you what it is about in much detail. But don’t you dare try to throw it away! I may not recall much that is in that book. But I am damn sure that book is in me. I will not allow important parts of me to be ripped out book by book, and stuffed in the trash!

So here I am – typing in front of hundreds of books, most of which I barely remember, yet few of which I will give up without resistance. I know that these books have much to do with the conceptual house cleaning task before me. But they dissolve into fleeting, spectral memories as I try to gather them into a coherent collection of thoughts.

I go to the bookshelves and finger a few books. I ask myself a bit disconsolately, “Where has all my learning gone?”

A cynic might acidly reply, “Evaporated, like rain puddles on a sunny day,” while in the background Peggy Lee mournfully sings, “Is That All There Is?”

“No!” I shout. “There is much more than that!” In a huff, I pull open a desk drawer full of index card notes made when I was young. I rummage through the cards hunting for a reply to the cynic. Ah! Here it is. From D. H. Lawrence’s poem, “Terra Incognita.” I go to the Lawrence book to make sure I copied the verse correctly onto the index card. 

There are vast realms of consciousness still undreamed of

Vast ranges of experience, like the humming of unseen harps,

We know nothing of, within us.

All my learning, all my thinking. Not lost!  It went into that region of the mind of which we know nothing, the self that is paradoxically not-self, extended-self, and even collective self. My learning is now “the humming of unseen harps.” 

Hesitantly, I whisper to the harps, “Come forth! I need your help.” The unseen harps reply in a feeling, which my word mind translates: “First, tell us the questions that haunt you. Then we will do our best to help you find answers.”

So, the dance begins between my mind of words and the unseen harps that I can only dimly hear. My word-mind poses the question I asked above: where has all my learning gone? The searchlight of my consciousness dives down and calls on the harps. They reply in the language of harp music. My word-mind searches for a script that captures the music. 

An answer! Words that at first seem to ring true. But then those words go back down to the harp world. Discomfort. An echo returns. My word-mind translates: “That answer isn’t quite right.” My word-mind revises its answer, seeking for the precision that the harps demand. The back-and-forth between harp world and word world continues, until at last the humming harps are silent. 

I have an answer that satisfies: All those years of study and thinking: not gone. My learning IS still there, in the harp world, waiting to be courted by the world of words, the world that built civilization on the shoulders of countless other divers into the harp world.

Filling the shelves before me are a few of the books that these divers wrote. Now it is my time to dive, to ask more questions, to find harp notes and to hum them, until they become words that ring true because they sing in harmony with the harps.