How soon people become impervious to what others say is the second criterion by which one discovers how alive a person is, as opposed to how long they have lived. The interaction of a baby with its mother, the meeting of children and playmates, of adolescents and their heroes, of students and teachers, of lovers with their partners, are decisive steps in gradually becoming more aware of how others see the world. The process may slow down when one finds it difficult to make new friends or acquire new interests, or when one relies on social networks that create only superficial links. Very recently MRI scanning has suggested that the most important part of a meeting is what happens after the meeting ends: its effects depend on how much reflection is devoted to penetrating its significance, and it is in sleep that this reflection is pursued with the greatest perseverance. When a person is asleep and is supposedly doing nothing, parts of the brain remain intensely active, using 20 per cent of the body’s energy, a mere 5 per cent less than the brain uses when it is awake and attentive to specific problems requiring immediate attention. This activity is apparently dedicated to reviewing personal memories, present experiences and future possibilities as well as attempting to understand other people, constantly evaluating hypotheses about what might happen in the future, and trying to find ways of avoiding painful surprises. The implication is not just that what people do in their sleep may be as decisive as what they do when they are awake, but even more that they do not give anything like enough time to musing on what they see and hear.
So the question Oscar Niemeyer raises is not how he succeeded in being so active for so long, but how much he was reshaped by the people and ideas he met during his 104 years, how long he remained receptive to ideas other than his own, how the books he read confirmed his own thoughts or injected new ones. He only very partially answered these questions himself, but enough to show how valuable his early mentors were in making him realise where he did not want to go; their importance was that they were different from him, inciting him, by the strength of their personalities and convictions, to discover what mattered more to him than their ideals, and what he could do that they could not. He began as a pupil of the urban planner Lucio Costa and as an admirer of Le Corbusier, twenty years his senior, but he then made his own way independently of them, and became more his own person. He moulded his own individuality under the provocation of others. When he moulded the concrete of his monuments he was not just expressing his tastes, but creating them in the process of interacting with his mentors, his staff and his materials. Le Corbusier, whose real name was Jeanneret, adopted his pseudonym saying everybody needed to invent themselves. But this is not something one can do on one’s own. How it can happen can be seen more clearly by looking at Niemeyer’s fellow artists.
He was born in the same year as the first Cubist painting was publicly exhibited, and while he was liberating architecture from the rectangle, Cubism liberated painting from perspective. Georges Braque (1882–1963) has something to add to Niemeyer’s story, in that he too, in gradually defining himself, needed a mirror, a mentor, a muse to clarify what he was searching for. What Le Corbusier was to Niemeyer, Cézanne and Picasso were to Braque. Discovering Cézanne forced Braque to ‘rethink everything’ and ‘fight against much of what we knew’. For six years, Braque and Picasso met almost every evening, discussed each other’s painting, experimented together, even tried on each other’s clothes and exercised themselves painting in each other’s style. Through this endless conversation, gradually Braque discovered that what he was interested in was not painting which imitated nature, but creating a canvas that was an independent entity, that had a life of its own, and that did not even need a frame. He then decided that it was not the objects in his painting that interested him, but their relationship, and he went on to realise that what concerned him most was relationship, the gaps and the links between people and objects and between them and him. This change in sensibility was not just a new fashion in art. It was also the expression of a desire to look at people or objects and appreciate them not by how much they resembled ideal forms of beauty or respectability, but by their relationship with oneself and with others, and by what they could contribute to one’s understanding of oneself and to the way one behaved. After looking at Braque’s paintings, a visitor exclaimed, ‘I would go round the house and say, my God, everything looks like a Braque.’ There are many more possible connections in the world than those that custom and convention notice. Seeing the world as others see it does not need to mean seeing it as one age group supposedly sees it.
The undeniable fact that the young are generally considered to be more beautiful than the old shows that the Visigoths’ criteria are not dead. The old who pretend that they are young may or may not be as beautiful as those who are really young, but they have other more interesting options apart from copying the appearance and manners of a different generation. Ancient civilisations have used cosmetics and clothing, for example, to emphasise the dignity of individuals as hunters or warriors or communicators with the supernatural, often with great artistry. In more recent times, by contrast, as soon as middle age is reached, conspicuous personal decoration is abandoned, discreet dressing is adopted, as though no longer able or willing to proclaim what an individual experience can offer to the rest of society. Those who are ashamed of their failures congratulate themselves instead on giving the next generation a chance to do better, letting each person do their own thing. Whereas in the past the young were expected to copy the old, now the old are copying the young, but neither makes clear where they are going.
It has become more difficult to uncover what hides behind the façade of youth that has become fashionable, and behind the sagging faces of the elderly, but the world looks slightly different every time one does succeed. It sometimes requires no more than a smile to change what one understands about another. In a flea market outside Paris, I once came across an old woman standing all alone, poorly dressed, trying to sell a worn pair of shoes that she had placed before her on the pavement, but nobody was paying any attention to her and she looked the very image of misery and despair. But when I spoke with her, her eyes lit up and gradually she was transformed: she became animated, and the animation made her beautiful.
In 1415, one of the first books ever to be printed with movable type was The Art of Dying, a bestseller all over Europe for several centuries, because what happened after death was the subject everybody wanted to know about. People were all heading for an afterlife, and vast numbers still are. How old or young you were had less importance than it does now, following a steady hardening of expectations from different age groups, increasingly segmented. There is no longer anyone to compare with Shunzhi Fulin (1638–1661), who ruled the huge Chinese empire, quite effectively, when aged between twelve and twenty-two, or William Pitt (1759–1806) who became prime minister of England at the age of twenty-four, and was one of the most competent the country has ever had. Today, instead of asking people their age, it is more useful to discover how alive they are, and when they stopped having new thoughts. Age is often a disguise.
Niemeyer’s extraordinary legacy is to be found not in the length of his life, nor in his inability to free himself from youthful fears; it survives in his buildings, but also in the equally original reconstruction of himself that he achieved through his collaboration with Le Corbusier, old enough to be his father.
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What is worth knowing?
I LIVE IN THE INFORMATION AGE, the Knowledge Economy and the Lifelong Learning Society, and nevertheless feel profoundly ignorant. I am assured that with better technology, better management and better education, I will be cured. But it may take some time.
While I wait, I should like to know how to cope with ignorance. I shall try to decipher the little I know about the habits of my own brain, in the hope that it will encourage others to reveal what they know about theirs. Brain-life has more secrets than sex-life.
I have pursued knowledge since my earliest years, with unquen
chable passion. I have embraced it in different ways at school, at university, as a teacher, author, researcher, and as an adviser to corporations and governments obese with information but still hungry for more. Nevertheless, I am incapable of understanding even a small portion of what there is to be known. I cannot remember half of what I was taught.
Many of my students have probably forgotten the other half too. I am not writing the confessions of one who believes he can remain forever young by being a perpetual student rejuvenated by every new piece of knowledge. Rather, I am trying to reconstitute the itinerary of a truant, who has no illusions about knowledge. Education has been a panacea for virtually all human ills for many centuries, and yet, despite all the marvels it has brought, some of humanity’s worst follies have been perpetrated by highly educated individuals and nations. Minds crammed full of information have not always known what to do with it. The managers of knowledge have not been innocent of deceit. Politicians constantly respond to criticism by saying ‘lessons have been learnt’, but the mistakes do not stop. Faith in Lifelong Learning dates from at least the time of Hsun Tzu, who died in 238 B.C., and who wrote, too optimistically: ‘Learning continues until death and only then does it stop.’ If it is so difficult to avoid being led astray by what one learns, or to be sensible in putting what one learns into practice, where else does hope lie?
I could blame my failure to learn all I should learn on having been born too late. Around 1600, I could almost have read all the 400 English books published each year as they came out.
Renaissance Men had an easier time than us. But today I am confronted with 200,000 new books annually, besides all other kinds of publications, journals and broadcasts. That figure excludes everything that is produced outside my little island. Half a million new books are published in the world each year. So humanity is clearly entering a new phase in the history of ignorance.
Twenty years of my youth were spent writing my History of French Passions, reading almost non-stop; I could plausibly believe then that I had come fairly close to having seen most of the significant evidence available on my subject. But it would be impossible for me to write such a book today, because so much new evidence has been found, no individual can hope to master it. My experience should perhaps have warned me off expanding my ambitions still further to trying to understand what being alive has meant in all centuries and in all civilisations. I did not foresee, however, nor did anyone else, the huge cloud of ignorance that the explosion of university education would spread across the world. A tsunami of doctoral theses and professorial monographs has changed the landscape of knowledge. The widening of scholarly interests in many directions means that every time I want an answer to some question, however tiny, I risk being buried under a torrent of responses, a hurricane of facts never imagined before, and an onslaught of ever more ingenious explanations, each from a different point of view. The more information there is, the more ignorance there is.
I am by no means the first to realise this. Humans have always suffered from there being too much information (as well as too little, because one can never know enough). The ancient monuments that reveal this best are encyclopaedias. I first became aware of their magic when, barely eight years old, I received two of them as gifts from my father; and I have derived pleasure since then studying their varying criteria for selecting, manipulating and plagiarising facts and opinions. From the earliest times, the most significant encyclopaedias have been those that have not just tried to make information available in an easily digestible form, but have given it meaning, to ensure that it leaves people feeling nourished rather than bloated. Facts by themselves are worthless, mere grains of sand and spikes of seaweed on a beach, unless they are collected and their edible part extracted and cooked to make knowledge. Between the third and eighteenth centuries, over 600 Chinese encyclopaedias were compiled; they are almost the equivalent of the pyramids of Egypt: the Yongle encyclopaedia (1408) was the work of 2,169 scholars; the Encyclopaedia of 1726–8, ‘the Imperially Approved Synthesis of Books and Illustrations Past and Present’, was 852,408 pages long. The Chinese called their encyclopaedias ‘classifications’ (leishu), because they were essentially compilations of ancient texts presenting all existing knowledge about Heaven, Earth, Humans, Events, Arts and Sciences in a form that would ensure that the supposedly learned men who ruled the country knew what traditions needed to be followed, and so that examination candidates for public service (there were over a million of these every year in Ming times) knew what they had to remember. These encyclopaedias gave lonely facts a sense of purpose, and, incidentally, compiling them kept potentially subversive scholars absorbed by the minutiae of editing texts instead of questioning tradition. Putting information in order meant giving it a slant and a message, and the emperors devoted a lot of energy to controlling the message.
The great mediaeval Islamic encyclopaedias did even more than that. They boldly attempted the synthesis of all known cultures, Mesopotamian, Greek, Indian, Iranian, Jewish and Arab, while at the same time propagating the particular opinions of the scholars involved: one of the most famous, the tenth-century encyclopaedia of the Brothers of Purity, for example, written in Basra, expressed their hope and expectation that government would soon wither away. By contrast, European philosophers like Bacon, Descartes and Leibnitz wanted information to be presented so that it could be used to make new discoveries. Diderot’s Enlightenment Encyclopaedia in twenty-seven volumes (1751–72) carried this ambition to an unprecedented level of subversion by attempting not a summary of existing knowledge but original research and social criticism aimed at reinventing government, religion, economics, education and much else. However, it had only limited success. Literacy failed to turn most people into philosophers or revolutionaries. Today, many encyclopaedias are timid summaries of what everyone believes, aids to help people converse politely, and to make superficial comments about fashionable names and Isms, concealing their ignorance. Harold Macmillan said the encyclopaedias he published aimed at no more than ‘alleviating bewilderment’. Knowledge does not necessarily eliminate ignorance.
The internet is the heir to this long ancestry. Though it opens information of all kinds to a much wider audience, it does not make any sense out of it. Wikipedia, like the Chinese leishu, rejects facts which have not been previously printed, imagining that a footnote reference to a previous publication guarantees respectability. The internet has not diminished, far from it, the vast numbers of people for whom all knowledge originates in one book. The arrival on the scene of armies of Chief Information Officers and Knowledge Managers reorganising data so that it contributes to the prosperity of corporations and the survival of governments still leaves unanswered the question of what is worth knowing by ordinary people wanting to lead more interesting lives. These information experts are concerned with the processes by which information can be stored and handled, not by its detailed content, let alone its moral value. Savouring its poetry is not part of their job, and they are neither seers nor sages. So it is not surprising that humans today are no wiser than their ancestors. What use is information if there is no wisdom? No-one claims that this is the Age of Wisdom.
However, my experience of struggling through the blizzards of information that make it so difficult to see ahead does not lead me to despair, nor to pine for the supposed calm and simplicity of ancient times, nor to feel any less excitement and satisfaction while learning. On rare occasions, the fear of revealing what is contained in the invisible encyclopaedia that individuals carry in their head does vanish: in Paris in 1968, for example, when state authority suddenly collapsed, I saw people unburden themselves to complete strangers and say what they would normally conceal; but they soon clammed up again. In this book I have tried to open up the pages of the encyclopaedia inside my own head. I need to discover what other heads contain, but not just to understand what is peculiar about mine, or to prevent me bumping dangerously into others. I cannot consider myself fully alive if I know only my
own thoughts.
The information I have accumulated in my head does not all point in the same direction. Instead of disturbing me, this gives me a sense of freedom. Learning is only a beginning. Writing history, I have always searched for truth, as honestly and diligently as possible, but when I finish, I realise that I have written a work of fiction, for I have selected fragments of what I perceive as the truth and pieced them together in my own way to create a picture that seems plausible to me. Nobody can re-create or remember the past exactly as it was. I applaud artists who have shown that the world is much more than it appears to the casual glance and who have had the courage to rearrange its elements as a way of extracting more profound messages. Like them, I have also sought to liberate the memories of the past from the iron chains of chronology, by juxtaposing events and ideas from different contexts so as to illuminate their universal significance. The past for me is not a string of stories but an imaginative creation of beauty and horror out of the totality of human experience. Creating knowledge is an art. That is very different from imbibing information or eliminating ignorance.
One day, I received a cutting from a Chinese business magazine. It had interviewed a famous visitor from the West, one of those rare people who has influenced almost everyone’s life all over the globe. He had been my student some thirty years earlier; he became the venture capitalist who was the first to invest in Google, Yahoo, eBay, humble start-ups that eventually changed the world. He was asked who had been the greatest influence on his career. He named me, and gave this reason: I had taught him that things are not what they appear to be. It is unusual for a teacher to be understood by a pupil. But he saw precisely the true measure of my ignorance. Every time I encounter an object, a person or an experience, I do not see only it, but also how else it could be. I am always asking myself: How could it be otherwise? This is the question that has made humans what they are today, for without it we would still be living in tree-tops. Which is why I ask what else can be done about ignorance, apart from battling against it with yet more information and endless learning.
The Hidden Pleasures of Life Page 33