Genius Fan

One of the many pleasures in learning about history and times past is ‘discovery’. By this I mean the process by which a person follows their interest and simply finds things out. I expect everyone has experienced that process. You can accumulate a great deal of knowledge on a subject very quickly if you have an interest, as you chase down information and answers. That’s because it’s interesting. The act of discovery is pleasurable for the brain and pushes you on to make more discoveries. I’ve been doing this – finding things out and enjoying the experience, but not realising this was a ‘thing’ – since 2021, when I first started getting into history. I discovered this ‘discovery’ concept while listening to an audio version of American writer Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book. I suspect this book is out of fashion today because of ‘old school’ concepts, but I also suspect it may be popular for that very reason. I enjoyed it and found it very useful. Not least because it introduced me to the concept of ‘discovery’.

Discovery, as I experience it, is fed and followed up by an online search of names and publications mentioned in the text or bibliography of the book I’m reading. More often I skip the search engine and go straight to one of several second hand book marketplaces. And there I usually discover the book mentioned. And then I re-realise, I remember, that people have been writing on a topic for generations and I can dig back through the decades to find more information about some small aspect of my subject. And all the while my brain is stocking up on information. No, that’s not right, ‘stocking up’ suggests effort. It’s much more ‘frictionless’ than that. My brain is soaking up information like a sponge. (At my age, I expect my brain is kicking out information unused for a long period of time, as it now has little, and possibly less and less shelf space on which to store information. I’m reading about coaching in the Eighteenth century, a subject which feels like the most important thing I could spend my time learning about, thanks to W. Outram Tristram.

Notes
How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading, Mortimer J Adler and Charles Van Doren (1940, updated 1972)
Coaching Days and Coaching Ways, W. Outram Tristram (1906 reprint)