On my desk, beside stacks of books and pencils, sits a small piece of paper with a quote written on it. It says: “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.” It’s from Henry James, and I first stumbled across it in a creative writing class a few quarters ago. I took it as good advice then, but occasionally while working I’ll glance up and see it and a heart-thudding question will flash across my mind: as I progress through life, how many details are being lost on me?
Trying to be one of the people on whom nothing (or at least, very little) is lost, I think, is part of what many of us seek from our education. Yes, when considering Henry James’s literary prowess, his words seem directed toward writers — and, yes, when I think of them I immediately visualize a serious-faced author jotting down notes in his journal, trying to verbally describe as many miniscule life details as possible. But these words can also apply to a medical practitioner trying to decipher a complex set of symptoms to make a diagnosis, or a lawyer or policymaker reading through the specifics of a case file or document. In all of these fields, and indeed in the entire realm of academia, attentiveness to detail becomes an essential skill. And, in that light, becoming “one of the people on whom nothing is lost” can sound like a very attractive life goal.
Indeed, the farther along we progress in our educations, the more detail-oriented our schoolwork can require us to become. To cite another writing-related example, remember those general five-paragraph essays that were emphasized in middle and high school curricula? That simple, straightforward structure served us well enough in those days, but now it does not lend itself well to the more complex arguments that we develop in our later years of education, in which paragraphs, sentences, and even words start functioning at the level of nuance. Formal learning, in many ways, is like wading deeper into a mire: to alter a common adage, the more you discover, the less you feel like you know, and the harder it is to conceptualize what the big picture looks like.
We want nothing to be lost on us, yet details can act as their own set of blinders. “Failing to see the forest for the trees” would be an appropriate phrase to describe the stereotype of academics that I have encountered outside of Stanford, a stereotype that describes individuals stuck in trivialities that do not matter to anyone besides the fanatics already immersed in that field. The oft-maligned “Stanford bubble,” perhaps, is an extension (or maybe only a relative?) of this academic stereotype. Described in these terms, the bubble mindset is simply this: we commit ourselves to missing out on none of the details of campus life, all while the broader world zooms by.
Losing ourselves in the details of a particular lifestyle can be reassuring, but I doubt that simply pouring energy into paying attention to minutiae is what Henry James meant. For one thing, none of us would be able to sustain such a mindset for very long. Our lives would become choked up by clutter, and how many of those details would end up being important anyway? Being a truly perceptive person seems to require a sort of double vision, a mindset flexible enough to grasp particulars and simultaneously see how they fit into the larger picture.
How to become this sort of perceptive, dual-minded person is something that I often ponder. For reasons other than the campus bubble, it is something that can be difficult to achieve at Stanford, or any place where we must live life at an accelerated pace. What larger-world reflection do we have time for? We bustle through our activities and our coursework, however irrelevant these spheres of our lives seem to each other. We drift in and out of disconnected groups of friends. We apply for various programs, grants, honors, trying to connect the dots and make them relate to each other. We take advantage of our youthful ability to be spontaneous. And then we step back from all of these details, the details that compose the daily rhythm of our lives, and try to figure out how it all fits. From my standpoint, I don’t often know.
The crux, I believe, of attaining the broader perceptiveness that Henry James speaks of, the perceptiveness that is at the heart of a well-utilized education, is to retain our sense of curiosity and open-mindedness about all people and all subjects. Of course, committing ourselves to grasping everything in the world is an unattainable goal, but it is an energizing one nevertheless. That is, as long as we don’t misunderstand and let the details sneak up on us. Not all of them, though. Just the unimportant ones.
Was anything in this column lost on you? Talk with Rachel about the small details or the bigger picture at [email protected].