Common Sense and Sensibility - Day 1300: 5 Minute Freewrite
"Books smarts don't mean 'sick-em," my dad always said when I'd bring home a report card full of A's (let us not mention the Bs and Cs of my math classes). Common sense was the only kind of intelligence he valued. When Mom listened to the radio, he'd say she "was always needing to learn stuff" but he already knew everything he needed to know.
I'm not sure he was kidding.
‘The only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing,’ Socrates said, but my dad would never read Socrates.
Dad was wrong about a lot of things but he believed himself right in everything.
He was wrong about knowing all that he needs to know, just as he was wrong about my abysmal lack of intelligence. When I left home halfway through my senior year of high school and entered college, I found hundreds (thousands!) of people who had "book smarts." Suddenly, someone told me I had a "spark of perception," a sensibility that set me apart from the common sense of my father and our farm-family, rural-community, small-town experience. It was a shocking revelation. My super-competent, uber-smart father, who told me from infancy what an "idiot" I am, was the idiot, and I was the smart one?
To this day, and I'm more than half a century old, I cannot believe I'm much more than an idiot. I realize that all of us do stupid things. Some of us never admit to it. Some of us dwell too much on what we have done wrong rather than focus on all that we have done right. And let us not even get started on who determines what is right, what is wrong: it's more subjective than my Fundamentalist Sunday School indoctrination would have us know.
We all need common sense, but maybe "uncommon" sense has more value than I was led to believe.
All those books I read, all those fairy tales, all those Bible stories. Books open doors to other worlds, other ways of thinking. Books help us learn empathy.
I could keep going with this but five minutes have passed, and everyone here already knows the magic of books. If my dad had read more books, he might have acquired some "sensibility" of the feelings of others.
Reading Is The Key To Empathy | World Literacy Foundation
The act of reading is intricately tied to empathy, because through reading we begin to understand lives and perspectives other than our own. In books, we can get to know other people, places, and times. Empathy in reading is the ability to understand and share the feelings of the protagonist, the author, of the human condition itself.
This week I'm reading historical fiction, Tears of Amber by Sofía Segovia, told from the point of view of German (Prussian) civilians, an overlooked but much-maligned people. My Kindle highlights include these comments she addressed to the reader:
Rudyard Kipling said that if history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten. A literary view of the human experience of the past invites readers into a real, living historical moment, so that the experience of lives and moments distant in time and space become their own. Literature transmits an incontrovertible, condensed experience from generation to generation. Thus, literature becomes the living memory of a nation. —Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
and
People need to see and hear the details of what is going on because their imagination is incapable of grasping general facts correctly. When a disaster consumes five million victims, this does not mean anything: the number is empty. However, if I show a single, individual man in his perfection, his faith, his hopes and his difficulties, if I show you how he dies, then you will remember this story forever. --Erich Maria Remarque
And here's just one linke on the wisdom of knowing we know nothing:
The Secret to Wisdom and Knowledge: Know that You Don’t Know
Most of us can't become wiser because we think we know everything. We believe we are already wiser and knowledgeable because we've read many books and we have many school certificates (degree, diploma, etc.). For this reason, we never question our ideas, belief systems, and the things we learned in school.
I may not have the "common" sense my dad has, but I have a sensibility he cannot grasp or internalize or manifest.
