Sunday, March 20, 2016

My New Calling

I just found this description of Aldous Huxley, by Antonio Melechi:
there was certainly no denying the staggering panorama of ideas that Huxley, a self-styled professor of nothing in particular, could navigate in his fiction.
So now when people ask what I do, I will answer "I'm a self-styled professor of nothing in particular."

1 comment:

G. Verloren said...

I've always been loathe to study any one thing for too long - there are simply so many fascinating subjects out there!

You can start from absolute ignorance of one topic and progress to a decent familiarity of it, then move to a completely new one and enjoy that sense of wonder and joy of learning all over again. And sometimes you end up looping back on something you've already studied a bit, and then you can study it in further depth.

And all the time you're opening new avenues of potential pursuit through tangential learning, moving organically from topic to related topic, discovering underlying connections that trace between them all. As as you gain more and more foundational understandings, you can apply them more and more to new topics, or to those you revisit in more depth, and it makes the learning process even easier and more enjoyable.

Specialization always has a valued place, but I find far greater enjoyment and fulfillment in a distinct lack of particularity.