A Thousand Things You Don't Really Have to Do

     How many books and/or stories and/or articles can the well-educated person read in a lifetime? How many films and/or television shows can s/he watch? How many popular songs can one listen to, and appreciate? How many works of art can be viewed? In each case, there must be many thousands, no? But to truly appreciate each piece, to get something from it that you can take away with you, that you want to share with others; how many, really? Every year lists are produced by pundits advising us of the ten best novels or non-fiction titles of the year, the ten best films, the best songs, the best albums, and so forth. Every once in a while, especially at year's end, we get the 100 all-time best. And Dr. Robert Boxall has come up with a book listing the "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die."
     Reading 1001 books of an average of 250 pages per book at an average reading speed of 50 pages per hour would take 625 8 hour days (almost two years of reading 8 hours a day!). That's about five days per book, and many of the books on this list are much longer than 250 pages, but I suppose if it holds your interest, you could finish a four hundred plus page book in a week. I did read the highly anticipated last Harry Potter in two and a half days, but, of course, there are no titles like that on a must-read list. The book 1001 Books… would take 2.4 days to read. Seeing the same amount of films of 90 minutes would likely take a third of the time.
     So, depending on the medium chosen, it should not be impossible to set yourself a list to follow to edify your cultural cravings. So many of us enjoy looking at these lists and arguing for inclusion of our favorites. The arguing probably arises from the fact that we have all gone "off-list" and do not want to feel we have wasted time on our path towards enlightenment. However, such guilty pleasures as reading the latest popular bestseller, classified by critics as "no-brow", or getting sidetracked by working one's way through a particular author's oeuvre, or watching campy B-movies, when there are still so many must-sees on our list cannot be avoided unless we approach a project like this in robotic fashion, from which, surely, we will derive little appreciation. More than likely, we will give up or put our list aside "to be worked on during vacation," or when we have more time (?).
     Nowadays, with the Internet and its trove of (mis)information available on myriad subjects, there is even more to distract us from such an endeavor than merely fleeting time itself. Still, I buy and store, and dip into, many, many sources for entertainment and edification, and I suppose to discover more about myself. With two bookcases overflowing with unread material, an mp3 player stocked with 1500 songs, thousands more archived on CDs, and more still on my hard drive, five or six year's worth of stories from the New Yorker, and other sources stored electronically along with hundreds of novels, articles culled and categorized in my own precisely detailed filing system from all over the world, and let's not even discuss the two or more films I see every week, thereby missing out on some while consoling myself with, "I'll see it when it comes to DVD," as I look for the latest uploads to YouTube, I think what I've discovered about myself is that I'm an uncultured slob with an overreaching desire to know all. What made me this way? And why does it seem, lately, that time is mocking me?
     As a teacher, I've always professed the idea that it is not necessary to memorize everything. It's enough to know how to delve into an information source and find what you need when you need it. I suppose that is behind my collecting habit. But I admit that nothing beats that moment of epiphany when reading, actually reading, a good book, that connection that occurs between your mind and that of the author. This cannot be gleaned through scanning or skimming, nor does it reside in the perusal of a list or a summary. Those epiphanies are necessary to life and learning.
     This started out to be a calculation of how many cultural artifacts one could absorb and still have time for actual living, but I was sidetracked. I couldn't remember the name of the author of 1001 Books… and went to look it up. A search led me to Listology, where a link led me to A Vocabulary of Culture, which I discovered is no longer being maintained. So, of course, I had to check out Jahsonic's blog, but not before I looked at one of the articles on dance music and Paradise Garage, where another link led me to Disco-Disco.com, and I felt compelled to reread a comment I had left there two years ago.
     All this sidetracking had me reformulating my aim here. I think now it's just a matter of focus. Nobody can learn or know everything. It's just impossible. We can only dip into the well and come up with a handful at a time, and hope it contains a treasure that we can write home about.