When AJ Jacobs wrote a book called
The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the
Smartest Person in the World, most people got the joke
and gave the book
favourable reviews. Not Joe Queenan. Writing in the
New York Times Review of Books, Queenan attacked The
Know-It-All, calling it "idiotic" and labelling Jacobs a
"jackass."
“He seemed to not understand the premise,” says Jacobs, in
an interview from his home in Manhattan. “He seemed to think
I was seriously trying to become smartest person in world.
When the book review called a couple of months later to ask
if I'd write for them, I sent them an essay, a rebuttal to
Queenan's absurd rantings. They liked it, and decided to run
it.”
The entire affair became instant cocktail party conversation
in the New York book circuit. Says Jacobs, "I call myself a
jackass no less than three times in the book, so he couldn't
even come up with his own insult!"
Jacobs, in fact, has no problem humiliating himself in print. His book details his endless embarrassments as he shares factoids with uninterested colleagues and his beleaguered wife, who eventually starts fining him a dollar for every irrelevant factoid, particularly if they are uttered during movies. "I get called Cliff Clavin all the time, but at least my facts are accurate, at least most of the time!"
Many of those facts came from a
project that became the framing device for the book.
Learning that his father had once tried to read the
Encyclopaedia Britannica, only to stop somewhere around
"Borneo," Jacobs decided to read the whole thing himself,
and hopefully close the gaps in his knowledge that had been
yawning wider in the years since college. "I was climbing
the intellectual Everest and restoring honour to the family
name," says Jacobs.
Anecdotes about his family and life are interspersed with
factoids drawn from the Britannica, which are arranged
alphabetically. For example, the entry on "Genghis Khan"
describes his father's particular interest in the
world-conquering Mongol. Why? It seems Genghis was a snappy
dresser. The section on "character writer" starts by
explaining the uses of these sketches, then jumps off to
draw a character sketch of his brother-in-law, who may well
be the Smartest Person in the World, and who particularly
delights in beating Jacobs at Trivial Pursuit.
Most reviewers have picked up on
Jacobs' humour. The section on the dragonfly notes that it
can eat its own weight in thirty minutes, "just like Roger
Ebert." But buried under all the humour is some fairly
serious discussion of epistemology. And, Joe Queenan to the
contrary, Jacobs has plenty of doubt about the value of his
quest to learn through amassed factoids.
He meets his high school English teacher, now a Buddhist,
who tells him that all that knowledge is actually making him
dumber, as it is cluttering his mind. He then recommends
Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet, about two inept
generalists whose knowledge is as broad as their talent is
shallow. But as Jacobs writes, at least they were trying to
achieve something, rather than "sitting around eating
pastries, ignoring basic hygiene and persecuting Jews, which
is what your average 19th-century Frenchman did."
Worse, another French intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre, mocked
Jacobs' very project, decades before it began. His
"Self-Taught Man" is not only reading the great works of
literature alphabetically, but turns out to be a child
molester.
While nowhere near the depravity of the Self-Taught Man,
Jacobs does agree that there is "a danger in being too
obsessed with knowledge and forgetting about the social
aspect." His book describes Ron Hoeflin, who lives in a tiny
apartment in which the rent is lower than his IQ and who has
stopped work on his magnum opus, a work of philosophy called
To Unscrew the Inscrutable, because he can't afford to
replace his printer.
“I was trying to figure out the
difference between knowledge and intelligence and wisdom,”
Jacobs says. “I’m not sure I’ve come up with a final answer,
but I do have metaphor. Knowledge is fuel and intelligence
is the engine. The more knowledge you have, the more
intelligent you can be, the more metaphors you can make and
the more facts you can use to problem solve and approach
problems.”
He also talks to Robert Sternberg, who wrote the
Britannica's entry on "intelligence." Sadly, Sternberg
believes that reading the Britannica to become smarter is "a
complete waste of time." But he does concede that reading an
encyclopedia could be like reading a religious work. Says
Jacobs, "It's a ritual that gave me stability and comfort;
gathering knowledge has a quasi-religious feel."
And he did pick up some nuggets along the way, as in the
Britannica's article on "Ecclesiastes," for example. But in
reading about the broad sweep of history, he also learned
that "this to, shall pass." He says: "Take the Taiping
Rebellion. As a narrow-minded westerner, I'd barely heard of
it. But 20 million people died. That's just shocking."
He writes: "Yes, we have the capacity to do horrible things.
We have created poverty and war and Daylight Savings Time.
But in the big sweep—over the past ten thousand years and
thirty-three thousand pages—we've redeemed ourselves with
our accomplishments. We're the ones who came up with the
Trevi foundation and Scrabble in Braille and Dr. DeBakey's
artificial heart and the touch-tone phone."
He even picked up a little wisdom from
Alex Trebek, whom he interviewed for Esquire. After
mistaking him for a Mexican gardener, he joined Trebek in
his private office, where the game show icon swore "like
Uncle Junior on The Sopranos," but nevertheless
managed to work words like "escarpment" into casual
conversation. Trebek also inspired Jacobs when he said, "I'm
curious about everything—even things that don't interest
me."
Unfortunately, meeting Trebek also disqualified Jacobs as a
Jeopardy contestant, limiting one of the few ways he
could profit from all that knowledge. Jacobs notes,
"Apparently, we're best buddies now and he calls me every
night with the answers."
With Jeopardy out of the picture, this left
Millionaire, on which he did in fact appear. He opted
not to emphasize his encyclopedia reading. "I didn't want
Meredith to say, 'Well, Encyclopedia Boy, are you going to
win the million?'"
And, in fact, he didn't. His $32,000 question required him
to know what an erythrocyte was. Stumped, he called Eric the
Arch-Nemesis, one of his three candidates for the actual
world's smartest person. (The other two are Stephen Hawking
and, in an egregious bit of flattered, your host here at
triviahalloffame.com). Although Eric had been a biochem
major, he did not know that erythrocytes were red blood
cells. Worse, Jacobs had already read the entry on
"erythrocytes," but had completely forgotten it.
This inability retain all 44 million words of the Britannica
is a subject of much consternation for Jacobs. In fact, the
Britannica talks about our inability to retain information
in article about the Ebbinghaus curve. Jacobs had a hard
time remembering "Ebbinghaus curve."
To his relief, though, when he actually journeyed into the
Britannica's Chicago HQ, he discovered that not even the
editor-in-chief knew every fact in his 33,000-page
production. "In retrospect, that should have been a fairly
obvious point," Jacobs concedes.
“But even a year after I finished reading the books, facts
keep dribbling out of my brain,” says Jacobs. “I was
visiting a friend with a cat, and I mentioned how Egyptians
mummified cats, but they also mummified mice, so that the
cats would have something to eat in the afterlife.”
In fact, regardless of how much he remembers, the mere act
of reading more than four feet of knowledge is
awe-inspiring, especially since the Macropedia can devote
dozens of pages to Chinese history, plate tectonics and
advanced math theory. Understandably, he sometimes simply
ran his eyes over the text.
He also continues to have what you
might call "adventures in trivia." His book details
excursions in which he meets like-minded fans of knowledge:
a chess tournament, a crossword puzzle convention, a debate
club, a Mensa event and courses in speed reading and memory
improvement. "I wanted to test the limits of knowledge in
the real world, and not just write a book about me reading a
book."
After his own volume came out, the New York Times
included Jacobs in its Night Out With column, in which it
followed him to a pub quiz. "We called ourselves the Know It
Alls, but we placed seventh, which I got some good ribbing
for. In my defence, there were a lot of questions about 70s
music. We would have done better if there'd been more
questions about commedia dell' arte, because the Britannica
talks a lot about that. One guy called us the Know-Nothings,
so I came back with some trivia about the Know Nothing
Party, which held up construction of the Washington Monument
because the pope had donated the capstone."
For his next project, some have suggested he read the Oxford
English Dictionary. "It's actually longer than the
Britannica: 60 million words versus the wimpy 44 million in
the Britannica. But I've decided my next project is to watch
all the Police Academy movies."
March 2005