The quiz-show contestant is, like Gradgrind himself, ‘a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts’.
We didn’t have an office but, if we had, we might have pinned a motto from Charles Dickens’s Mr Gradgrind on the corkboard: ‘What I want is, Facts … Facts alone are wanted in life.’ It was an excellent schooling in what we might call raw knowledge. I did fairly well, answering questions on ‘British birds’, and afterwards I was recruited to write questions for the show, working alongside a small team of ex-contestants and quiz champs, all of whom knew a great deal more than I did about practically everything. Some years ago, I appeared on the long-running British television quiz programme Mastermind. But beside emotional truth, beside the human perspectives of the author, it seems dispensable.Īm I right to worry? I know for a fact, after all, that there are still places where knowledge for its own sake is – up to a point – prized, even rewarded. Sure, it has its uses – of course, we wouldn’t want to do away with it altogether.
Increasingly, I get the impression that dusty, tweedy, moth-eaten old knowledge has had its day. ‘Nature doesn’t waste its time on that.’ Jini Reddy, who explored the British landscape in her book Wanderland (2020), wondered which was worse, ‘needing to know the name of every beautiful flower you come across or needing to photograph it’.
‘It is only humans that define and name things,’ Hamer declares, strangely. Marc Hamer, a British writer on nature and gardening, said in his book Seed to Dust (2021) that he likes his head ‘to be clean and empty’ – as if, the naturalist Tim Dee remarked in his review for The Guardian, ‘it were a spiritual goal to be de-cluttered of facts’. I worry, sometimes, that knowledge is falling out of fashion – that in the field in which I work, nature writing, the multitudinous nonfictions of the more-than-human world, facts have been devalued knowing stuff is no longer enough.
0 kommentar(er)
