Can life ever last long enough
to satisfy a lifelong learner?
When my high school guidance counsellor asked me, “What career do you think you are interested in pursuing?” I’m pretty sure he wasn’t expecting my response.
“I want to be a Renaissance Woman.”
Even in the days before Google, I knew this wasn’t a practical career goal, but I was fascinated by the thought that at some point in the not-so-distant past, those who were truly well-educated could know a LOT about all there was to know.
Was it Ever Possible to Know It All?
Did Aristotle really possess all known knowledge? What about Da Vinci? What about the women of leisure (those elegant grand dames of stately homes) who spoke several languages and had time to paint exquisite botanical paintings?
Take a moment to scroll through this website (created by the Oak Spring Garden Foundation) which features the work of women botanists, entomologists, and herbalists. These women were dedicated to close observation, patiently capturing the fine details of caterpillar hairs and nuanced colour variations in lily petals. They didn’t just paint pretty pictures, they were full of curiosity, scientists at heart with the patience and time to immerse themselves in their studies.
And, those women travelled – hitching up their heavy skirts as they climbed aboard camels and hauled themselves up to the top of mountain peaks. They read, wrote, painted, created… and yes, ran households and gardens tended by those whose fortunes did not include the privileges afforded to colonial overlords.
I wanted to be one of those women (not the overlord part, but endlessly busy learning, travelling, and creating). In my spare time, I wanted to ride a horse across Mongolia, sail single-handed around the world, win Nobel Prizes for literature and physics, and, ideally, add an Oscar or two to my trophy shelf (acting, screenplay, and directing - so, three would have been a nice hat trick). Not that winning per se was the most important thing - it was the idea of doing it all and doing it all reasonably well that appealed to me.
As a kid, I dreamily imagined myself ambling through life with a magnifying glass in one hand, open book (in Latin or Greek) in the other, moving from one advanced degree to another until, in my late 90s, I would quietly slip off into never-never land with all my bills magically paid, my body pain-free, and my brains bulging with all the things I had come to understand.
Ah, Reality
This is not how my life has played out. Yes, I did manage to read a few books between husbands and unexpected children and dying parents and soul-destroying jobs, but the biggest lesson I managed to learn was just how little I knew and was ever likely to know.
The inconvenient realities of life, illness and endless money stress, as I struggled to hold things together in a creative career, stood in the way of living my fantasy life of a full-time perpetual student. (That said, I wrote a lot of books about all kinds of things, none of which ever appeared on the NYT Bestseller list – though one about trees made it onto the New York Librarians list of Best Books for Children, which felt pretty great but still didn’t nudge my bank account into the black for more than a nanosecond. As for writing something worthy of a Nobel Prize? Well… technically, I’m not dead yet, but chances are slim to none that I’ll ever come up with something worthy of being put on the shelf beside the likes of Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing, Alice Munro, Ishiguro, or any of the other fine writers who have accomplished so much in their illustrious careers).
And yet…
Doesn’t every moment have the potential to be a learning opportunity? Good, bad, ugly, or amazing?
Did I ever fully let go of that youthful dream of being a lifelong learner?
For as long as I have a library card, I can keep reading. Podcasts and audiobooks, an endless supply of Substacks and streaming documentaries, a New York Times subscription on my phone!!, instructional YouTube videos teaching me anything I might imagine I might want to learn…
The problem is not what should I tackle next? but how can I possibly live long enough to scratch the surface of what I want to learn?
Why Not Learn to Draw?
This year, I’ve been teaching myself to draw as part of a project to capture my father’s life in a graphic novel memoir. Dad was born in England in an era when milk arrived in glass bottles on the back of a horse-drawn cart and the house was heated by a coal fire.
Born into a family of coal miners and saddlers (who made harnesses for the pit ponies), his passion from a very young age was art. His singular focus was one of the things I most admired about him. For as long as he lived, he worked in his studio every day. He was working on a lino-cut print the day he died. I had spoken to him a few days before when he commented, “I can’t plan far ahead anymore. But there’s still so much I want to do.”
His to-do lists were long and he left many of them behind. They included practical matters (like renewing prescription medications), shopping lists, and notes about his creative projects (deepen shadows in snow). He was planning to visit me in the mountains later in the spring (to gather more material for a series of mountain prints and paintings of the Rockies he had planned) and beyond that, was eager to go back to Europe.
Instead, he died of a massive heart attack in his armchair.
Sudden. Decisive. Final.
Dad was always finding inspiration in what he saw around him – from beetles and sunflowers, interesting buildings to wild landscapes. He was always experimenting – learning new techniques, playing with new ways of making art, pushing himself to keep going back to the proverbial drawing board.
When I sit down to the blank page, whether to write or to draw, I think of him and the number of times he must have done the same thing as he prepared to create something from nothing. Smoothing his hand over the expanse of paper, he’d take a deep breath and then begin, trusting that something would come.
Why Not Give In? Embrace the Eager-to-Learn Kid Inside?
This fall I’ve decided to go back to school. I’ve been collecting books from the reading list – all those serious tomes I should have read before now but somehow haven’t. The pile towers beside my keyboard and when I lift a title from the top, open the book, and smooth my hand over the page – there it is. The frisson of excitement and anticipation that I am about to read something I’ve never encountered before. As I begin to read, I experience a strange combination of horror and fear and delight that I know nothing much at all. That I can be surprised. That my mind can be changed. That time is ticking and I will never get to the end of the lists of wonderful books that have been written. It’s simultaneously depressing and exhilarating.
Even as I begin to wade through the required texts – Plato, Aristotle, Abelard & Heloise - I know that great thinkers, scientists, poets, artists, musicians, philosophers, and filmmakers are coming up with more brilliant ideas, making connections, creating more knowledge, discovering new truths about the nature of the universe, the soul, our great purpose in life, more than I will ever have time to absorb.
I am doomed to fail at even coming close to that early dream of being a Renaissance Woman, but I’m also blessed to know that I will die trying.
The deep hole of all the things I cannot know gets bigger with every passing moment. At the same time, every fragment of every moment is rich with the potential of all the infinite nuggets of knowledge upon which I might stumble.
Simultaneously, my world expands to include all possibilities – and contracts to the microcosm of the only thing any of us ever knows for certain.
I am here.
This is now.
This is all.
Nikki Tate writes Nikki’s Current Work (Life) in Progress.
Gorgeous essay on learning, trying, honoring. I did go to the suggested website of women botanical artists. I'm not sure if Mary Delany is there, but do check out Molly Peacock's terrific book _The Paper Garden: Mary Delany begins her life's work at 72_. Thank you, @Nikki Tate for joining us here on this collaborative site on the arts. xo ~ Mary
Love this: "Did I ever fully let go of that youthful dream of being a lifelong learner?" I don't know if this is true, but my sense is that there are world cultures where this view is encouraged. Prague feels like a place that encourages imagination, art, and curiosity (though perhaps it is being corporatized fast enough to be losing this quality). I wonder if a thread for you through those major life disruptions that you hint at is a suppression of this insatiable youthful self. I've thought a lot about that recently -- hoping to find new relationships where creativity is valued, where conversations can go on for hours, where curiosity and wonder are not seen as childish, but as child-like in the best possible sense. We only get this one wild and precious life, as Mary Oliver reminds us. I'm still trying, in solidarity with you, to avoid liquidating too much of that life in the exchange of labor for money. Thanks for this reminder that I'm not alone.