Wha’ do ya’ know?

My favorite line in the film “The English Patient” (which I saw five times in the theater, because of Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Kristin Scott Thomas, Naveen Andrews, Colin Firth, Willem Dafoe, Director Anthony Minghella, Author Michael Ondaatje, the landscape, Gabriel Yared’s music, John Seale’s cinematography, the passion, the skin/sand continuum, need I go on?) is when Binoche’s character Hana says to Fiennes’ character Almásy, when he asks if she knows Heroditus’ histories:

“I don’t know anything.”

Almásy’s been burned unrecognizably. He’s on his death bed - an old one in a dusty shell of a Tuscan monastery. Hana is his hospice nurse, and she’s feeding him plums like a mother bird, first peeling the fruit from the skin with her teeth, then placing the peeled fruit in his mouth. “It is a plum plum,” he says, chewing. Her innocence and honesty are a revelation.

I’ll be 51 Wednesday, and I can say with glee, I don’t know anything. (Not that I’m innocent.)

I don’t know if you feel like this, but every day, my thoughts tend toward: Huh? I didn’t know that, or, What’s that all about? Information overload, sure. We’re bombarded. It’s one reason I seldom read the newspaper. It’s also why there is a stack of magazines opened to unfinished articles on my table. I want to be informed, but come on.

But that's not all of it. It's not just that I don't know files of information. I don't want to close files. Because if you "know" something, you're not open.

The nice thing about being over 50 is that you don’t care so much any more whether you know anything. When I was 29, I knew everything. I had to. My reputation depended on it, I thought.

I wonder how many twenty-somethings like Hana can really say, honestly, “I don’t know anything.” But let me tell you, there’s freedom in those words.

I guess where I am now at the start of my 52nd year is that I want to know more about a couple of things only, not a little about a lot. I’m surrounded by PhDs at work, and they are good examples of people who have a long attention span and drill down to the core in their area. When you read 150 books on one topic or author, write a book about it, teach it, write articles and maybe more books the rest of your life, you might begin to know something about something.

I didn’t choose that path. Maybe I could have (am I kidding myself?), and sometimes I wish I had.

But I have no regrets. I’m not so much interested in head knowledge as I am in direct knowledge now. I want to know people and experience the human exchange. I want to learn to paint. I want to know how things work. I want to understand what makes the shadow on the moon without looking at a diagram.

I wonder if I have the attention span. It’s way too easy to put things on a shelf before they're "done."

Well, here’s to another year chewing on what I’m fed, like a baby bird.