Read widely, not deeply

Life has a limit, but knowledge has none. If you use what is limited to pursue what has no limit, you will be in danger

(Zhuangzi)

Today, I am going to explain why it is more important to read widely, than deeply

At first, this may look like a contradiction to my earlier advice: which is a slow, pensive, inefficient reading of the time proven classics. But it isn’t. There is no contradiction here

Let’s see why

***

What do I mean by reading deeply?

I mean, choosing a narrow theme, a topic, and burying yourself into it.

I mean - in other words - doing research on a subject

That is a great endeavour, a worthy endeavour, an endeavour you must absolutely learn how to do. And yet, at the same time, that is a very risky, dangerous enterprise, something that can absolutely destroy your life if you have stupidity to let it out of control. And, today I will explain why.

Imagine, you bury yourself into some specific subject.

For example, Napoleon. Read everything about Napoleon, every book you got. Everything on his life, his career, his views, his aesthetic preferences. His military campaigns, and his governmental policies. His legislation. His religious and philosophical convictions.

And no, you don’t just scratch it on the surface. You go deep. Once you have explored the available body of scholarship on the subject, you go further. You study the primary sources, starting from the memoirs and diaries. You explore the newspapers. You study the perspectives of his foes and opponents, of his friends and allies, of his soldiers and servants. And so on.

Are you done with the books & dissertations? Do the published primary sources. Finished with that? Great, now it’s time to check out the archives. And no, I am not talking of the French archives only. For to get a comprehensive picture, you need to explore the archives of multiple countries, produced in different languages. Which means you will need to familiarise yourself with the German, Polish, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Arabic and the Ottoman, and that is only the beginning of it, for once you have learnt the language, you will need to study palaeography.

(Of course, I am joking. In reality, you will never be past the stage one. For the published books and articles in English only, can never be studied all within a span of an individual human life. At no point in your career, will you be able to confidently say that, yes, I have read and processed the existing body of published scholarship, even on one single subject, and in one single language. There will be always plenty of great, interesting, brilliant and very useful studies you have missed).

By this point, you may have already noticed the danger. And the danger is - even a one single topic - such as the personality of Napoleon and his military & political accomplishments, is effectively inexhaustible. That is the endless well, a well without a bottom, and there is absolutely no chance you will ever drain it all.

You can literally spend all your life onto it, and still - be nowhere near the end.

That is a tunnel without any light in the end.

Second. Eye fogging effect. While dragging through this tunnel - without any light in the end - you will be going through the ugly, awful transformations. Your vision will be getting clogged. Burying deeper, and deeper, and deeper in search of perfection you will be losing any idea of why you have started it all in the first place.

Like, actually, why? What was the reason?

By this point, you will have forgotten that, completely. For you have not started studying Napoleon for the sake of Napoleon, of course. Nope. You started it all, because of some general idea, some general question, some abstract problem, a problem that you - since then - have long forgotten.

It may not be an explicit question, even. Not even something verbal, nor something you could verbalise. It may have been some general impression, some picture, some kinaesthetic perception, anything - that moved you to go along this way, and not any other. It was, perhaps, something vague and elusive, something you could not formulate, and still, that gave you the reason to choose this road, and an energy to march forward.

In any case, it was some abstract idea - implicit, non-verbal, perhaps, - and an idea that somehow connected to the general scheme of things. For it was something general and abstract that made you do what you did, something ideal, of which the earthly Napoleon with all his earthly campaigns are merely the rough and imperfect reflections.

By now, however, it is all long forgotten.

Your eye got fogged, your lenses got fogged, and with this fogged vision of yours, you can no longer see, nor remember how anything of it connects with the general scheme of things, and that general, abstract question that you originally attempted to answer.

***

Now the thing is: our education, our career, all of it forcefully moves us towards the extreme specialisation, and an insectoid one. It forces us to choose a theme, and stick to it, and dig, dig, dig into it, deeper and deeper. By and large, societal institutions impose a certain requirement of linearity upon our careers, and incentivise us to follow the path we have chosen, for like forever.

(That is very visible in the academia, which puts a great symbolic value on choosing a small field, and then drilling a hole, to the centre of the earth. Which is considered as a very noble thing to do).

But do you really need to dig deeper? I mean, for your own good?

It is quite likely that you have already answered the question you were seeking - or you have worked out a sufficiently good answer (a very important concept) - and you now must move forward, or you will get buried in it, as in a swamp, or in the quick sands

You get stuck, without any idea of how you got here, or what you wanted to do in the first place

That is what I did - had to do - and a lot of times.

I had to cut off my own research, and say myself - stop, full stop. Stop right now, because if you keep going you may absolutely waste your entire life - or at least all your productive years on that tiny-mini question that is just… not worth it.

Like, yes, it’s not worth it - and that’s why I put a limit to my research, and after some hours, or days, or months, or sometimes years, I say full stop, I take whatever I have found (or not), and I leave, and I will not be doing this any further. It may very well be, that I did not find anything particularly valuable at all, but even in this case, I will move forward and cut my losses.

Which is something I absolutely can do. Even if I cannot retain back any time, nor effort I have spent on a research, I may at least stop spending any more time on it.

***

Now why you probably should move forward from a topic you have been researching for a long, long time and do something else? I think there is a very good reason for that.

When obsessed with some kind of narrow niche, or topic, you tend to vastly exaggerate its overall importance. For at the very best, it is just one, tiny grain of sand, on the shores of a vast ocean. And you are a child playing with that grain on a beach.

Now choosing a grain of sand, and playing with it, and studying it, under a microscope is - without any doubt - a very worthy endeavour.

May be you should do just that. May be not. Anyway, what you probably should not do, is spend all your time onto it.

For there is much more to study, around you. Shells. Birds. Small crustaceans in the sand. Pebbles in the water. Water itself. Plants.

Meanwhile, obsessed with this small grain of sand you are forgetting of the vast ocean beyond and everything in it. The more time you spend, the more effort, the more the whole universe collapses (in your fogged mind, of course) to this tiny bit of grain you are studying, and the less you are conscious of the whole world beyond.

It absolutely pays off, to raise your head from your a-grain-of-sand-study, look around and see whether you even should be doing what you are doing right now.

It absolutely pays off to question your priors

Now to do that, to question your basic assumptions, you must again remind yourself of the general scheme of things. You need to raise your head up from whatever you doing at the moment, and look around. And for that to happen, you must stop studying your favourite grain of sand, and do something different now.

Full stop

There are so many grains of sand, and they are so different from each other. You probably should not be an expert in just one of them. You probably should have a look at… some other grain of sand? It will probably do your more good than studying just one.

***

If you consider yourself an expert in Napoleonic studies, or if you have been just reading, and reading and reading on Napoleon for quite a long, then, I guess, it is quite likely that a one more book on Napoleon will not do you much good.

Like, you may think you need to read it, but you probably don’t.

May be you should read something else entirely. May be you should read a book on the maritime Vietnam.

That is a random book I saw in a bookshop, and bought it.

I do not consider myself an expert in Vietnamese studies. In fact, that is probably the first book on Vietnam, I have been reading, ever.

I am not aiming to focus on Vietnam, nor I am planning to learn Vietnamese, in the foreseeable future.

I have never even been to Vietnam, except for a few days in Ho Chi Minh, and in the Mekong Delta.

Still, I found it worth reading, and extremely, immensely valuable in terms of learning. I would even say that I find it so valuable exactly because Vietnam is a complete blank space for me. Hic sunt leones.

What I get from this book, is some basic ideas, concepts of Vietnamese history - which, again, I know absolutely nothing about - and, perhaps, even more importantly, of how does it connect to the general scheme of things. Which, in this particular context means the maritime worlds of East and Southeast Asia.

I start to understand Vietnam as a land-based, agrarian grain-state, of Confucian character, which - nevertheless - was connected with the outer world through the thousands of maritime links, and in this capacity had been highly dependent upon the foreign commerce.

(Like, yeah, you may condemn commerce in general, but when you want to start a war, you will need the gunpowder, and you gotta import all the gunpowder components you lack by sea, via the maritime links. However much the emperor despises the smugglers, he needs them, needs them very much).

I learn what kinds of maritime networks was Vietnam historically dependent upon, and what kinds of cultural influences have been these networks bringing, historically. I start to appreciate the vast role of foreign merchants, first Indian or Indianised, them Muslim, and finally European.

I get to understand that in the high middle ages, somewhere between 1000 CE and the coming of the Europeans, virtually all of the long run trade in this part of the world was either controlled, or heavily dependent upon the Muslim merchants, and not only in Vietnam, but along the entire coastline of the continental East Asia, all the way up to the Pearl River and further, to Yangtze, so that the most stereotypical of the sea faring cultures of China (I mean the Fujianese) had been heavily influenced by their contact with the Islamic world of maritime commerce.

I, finally, understand that Vietnam itself - or rather the territory that forms what is now Vietnam - used to include a number of these sea faring cultures, most importantly the Austronesian Champa. Sort of a part of Malay world. Which, nevertheless, could not really compete with the agrarian grain-state of Vietnam in military terms, and was, over time, completely crushed by it and wiped out from the map, so now only the erudites know its name.

(Aha, I see, so the commercial sea faring cultures - as a general rule - cannot do anything against a Confucian grain state. Despite its many flaws and weaknesses, the latter model seems to be just stronger in military terms, over the longer period of time).

I did not finish the book yet, so these are my preliminary conclusions, preliminary thoughts on the subject. Still, even at this point, this book - from a completely new field of knowledge to me, the field I did not know anything about - does a massive un-fogging effect, clearing my vision and my consciousness. Diving into something I have never dived before, learning something completely knew to myself, allows me to make connections I would not have made otherwise and get a clearer sight of the general scheme of things. Which, ultimately speaking, is the thing that matters.

***

One of my friends has started her studies, in a good British university.

My advice to her was: just go into a library and walk around the shelves.

You don’t have to read all these books, you most certainly won’t read all of them.

Still, walking around, looking at their titles, scrolling through their pages - when you like them, will do much good to you, much more good then burying yourself into any single book specifically.

Why is that?

For when you do that, you will be noticing that certain things exist. Like, certain topics exist in the first place. Certain spheres of knowledge. Certain phenomena of the objective reality.

(You are noticing the ocean).

Next you will be noticing is how vast is the overall space of knowledge, and how insignificant is your own, personal knowledge, combined to the overall sum of it. You will be appreciating the vastness of the ocean, the richness of the ocean, the diversity of it, and the interconnectedness of everything with everything, in so many ways utterly incomprehensible for you.

Long story short, wandering around the books, so many books you will never read, that’s what makes you smarter. You start to realise & appreciate the scale of your ignorance, and learn how to live with it.

You will learn to sail the ocean, without ever attempting to drink it all.