[4] My Heroes' Heroes

"I see no better steadying force than to take history personally; I mean, not solely as aid to serenity, but as power with the right to be 'the intruder at the door.'"
-- Jacques Barzun

As I start my thirties, it seems people around me once avid for knowledge and exciting artistic discoveries hit a barrier.

The symptoms may be familiar to many personally, or at least through observation of friends: first, a reduced number of valuable references and exciting discoveries occur: long gone are the days of discovering Martin Scorsese or Chuck Palahniuk for the first time. Second, a certain nostalgia and repetition sets in and heroes become deified in the absence of exciting enough replacements. This is particularly apparent in rock fans.

In short, given a rich enough popular knowledge background during your teens and twenties, by the time you hit thirty you may feel like you've exhausted what is "cool to know," and the rest is repetition, footnotes, occasional minor discoveries.

Coping Strategies

One popular coping strategy is to teach: chasing the dragon by introducing others to the same set of references. This is both a necessary enterprise and a consolation prize. On one hand is important and satisfying to share, on the other it is a pale comparison of the thrill of research and discovery of new treasures for yourself.

The second strategy is to give up: basically rationalize the experience as an inherent limitation of your capacity as a human; categorize intellectual curiosity as a phase, or in the worse case, declare bitterly the world as a known quantity with little else to offer and let repetition set in.

The Nature of the Problem

To a certain extent, the reader will be surprised to know, I find truth in the last strategy mentioned: the world of mid-brow valuable references available through pop culture, which we usually acquire in our teens and twenties is finite and relatively easy to exhaust. There is only so many movies as good as Taxi Driver. There is no need, however, for despair:

The issue, as far as I can discern, has its root on the way we discover "cool" information in the modern world. This mode is best summarized by the "find more like this" or "if you liked this artist you may like..." buttons on online interfaces. To guide yourself by the thrill of similarity is to travel a relatively flat surface searching for the next sweet taste in your mouth. The candy store is ample but at some point you'll exhaust it.

Changing Strategies

We all heard the stories of Newton and Descartes turning to tradition in their latter years, Borges learning icelandic to read the veddas, instead of reading the newspaper, and Rosellini quiting commercial movies to do character studies of kings and queens. These episodes are often sensationalized but I think they hide a very useful and down-to-earth strategy: to keep interested and excited these guys decided to get lost on the volume of history instead of trying to roam the plane of "more like this."

Lets call this strategy looking for "my heroes' heroes." It is a very rewarding process and as far as I can tell far harder to exhaust during a lifetime. It holds the power of truly new discoveries and gives volume to an artistic experience that was previously planar.

What's more, I suggest that without this approach where every curious person turns into a historian, the pressure of finding new exciting things is impossible to satisfy. Reminds me of that Umberto Eco joke where they guy turns to the girl and says: "pardon me, do you have any plans after the orgy?"

Fabio Arciniegas A. - San Diego, CA April 2009