Sum More Equal Than Other by Adam Golaski

My earliest memories include horror fiction, the mystery and excitement of it, the strange familiarity of it: Dad perched on the edge of a wooden folding chair reading “The Masque of the Red Death” and “The Damned Thing” as I drifted off to sleep; the books that became self-forbidden because of certain illustrations; and the garish paperbacks, which made good fiction indistinguishable from trash (there isn’t much of an artistic gap between the skeletal postman on the cover of the churned-out Chain Letter and the skull, strips of flesh still clinging to the bone, of the admirable sixth edition of Grant’s Shadows series). Fortunately, my literary memories are not limited to horror. Mom struck a balance with her literary loves—novels featuring women discussing both pride and prejudice while ambling across a great lawn—or men with plaid topcoats examining corpses found by the Thames: and there was my own youthful approach to reading, which was to read what stories struck my fancy and to let those stories lead me to the next story, forever unfolding, forever expanding. I am grateful; this was a marvelous time in my reading life because I read so openly, and now it is easy to be open; the pleasure of that approach suggested my currently intellectualized and deliberate effort to limit my literary allegiances: to read for knowledge, enlightenment and pleasure (possibly in that order, for better or for worse), rather than to click off someone’s checklist (Radcliff’s silly and political top 100 books list, for example).
Let me make an obvious statement: there is a lot to know, a lot to read, more than any one person can ever expect to read, much less process. From this obvious statement, it seems reasonable to me to consider the option of not focusing your reading on what most literate people have read but to focus your literary sights elsewhere (with a critical eye)—why read only what many people have read when that knowledge has already been admitted to, and evaluated by, humankind when you could do the service and have the pleasure of admitting and evaluating new knowledge, knowledge that otherwise is essentially lost to humankind?
Recently, my long-ago and suppressed interest in biology has reemerged, so I’ve been doing some science reading. In my reading, I’ve noticed a particular motif which comes up often in these essays and articles, and that is of the person who because of some powerful event in their life—such as the diagnosis of an autistic child—has educated themselves in a field they previously knew little about, became knowledgeable and current in that subject, and actually discovered something useful—such as that by removing milk and gluten from the child’s diet, the child’s autism faded away.* The value of this story, and of knowing it is not an especially unusual story, is that knowledge—most knowledge, maybe all knowledge—is attainable. If we continue to ask questions, and are open to the challenge of learning the language required to gain the information we need to answer our questions, we have a chance of making great/useful discoveries.
The openness required to make such discoveries is a desirable characteristic; that kind of openness is understanding that knowledge should not be viewed merely as a tool. Why do we go to school? To get a good job. Why do we take night classes? To get a promotion. Does knowledge equal money? And is any knowledge that can’t be directly transformed into money valueless? No, and no, and no and so on. Knowledge is what makes us great.