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Forgetting, Part 4

March 24, 2014

Never a complainer (and maybe to a fault) my father never mourns his loss of memory. In fact, in the throes of his dementia, he seems essentially satisfied. Not pleased perhaps, but certainly not at odds with the nothingness.

Although that’s an exaggeration. It’s wrong to think he makes no new memories — in fact, he does; it’s just those memories are weak: wispy and filamental, ghostly and slight. He can still remember his feelings and moods — he can remember gists. His memories have simply blurred like a cataract-vision.

My father was never a doer. Even though he was employed as an engineer, he never built things, tinkered around the house, or took on curiosity when something new (computers, VCRs, digital music) came along. My father was a creature of habit, and one of his habits was not depth. A player of tennis, he was never much one for strategy. As a painter (and earlier, when he would snap photos or film home movies) it was never about the composition or the image — no, it was always only about the subject he was painting, snapping, or filming. Nothing more. As a kid, of course, I was never in a position to know, but as an adult, it’s obvious to me now my father never made more than a dilettante of anything he did.

Although perhaps that dilenttantism was what he was after all along. After all, he was never dissatisfied with the results of his actions and decisions. He was happy enough with said paintings, photos, movies, tennis, garden, etc. (he was never a complainer). And now his mind won’t allow him to achieve anything else.

I’m not privy to his disappointments. But it’s possible with my father that being a dilettante was as much as his ambition ever was all along.

Has history become America’s stepchild? The answer dates, I would guess, to Sputnik, in whose ensuing paranoia math and science and engineering became elevated over other fields of learning. It’s my impression that, prior to that, education was considered more holistic, that a proper education was an education more complete. An expansive education. An education where every aspect of learning served to inform every other aspect.

No more. As a legacy of those Sputnik-fearing days, we now have STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) programs to steer students and workers toward those fields, in many ways more than we did in the depths of the Cold War. Now fears of satellite and missile technology have been replaced by more prosaic business concerns (as well as trepidation at losing our place at the top of the international food chain).

Profit, in short. And these concerns and directives have long come at the expense of other learning: history and art, literature and music. And at a cost, I think, of the depth of thinking that was once the norm. Nowadays are the days of specialization (and overspecialization) which have been bought at the cost of the discernment and judgment that occurs (or at least can occur) with a more comprehensive schooling. Who today can imagine a modern scientist at the moment of scientific achievement quoting the Bhagavad Gita a la Robert Oppenheimer?

We have forgotten how to think, I think. Is it time now for a return — maybe not to a liberal education in the strict sense — but to one that includes both science and art, math and history: in short, a complete education? A pessimist at heart, I don’t believe we ever will — after all, there’s no profit in thought. No, in these days of our fears of falling behind the rest of the world, fears are all we see at the end of the tunnel we ourselves have built. And so has this become the meat of our American vision — wolves nipping at our heels?

(BTW: Sputnik was launched in October of 1957. I didn’t remember that — I had to look it up.)

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