At eight I knew what I wanted to be for the rest of my life; a polyhistor. My mother said that ‘polyhistor’ was a pretentious word for an eight year-old, but I told her to stop being calumniatory.

Despite such early set-backs, it is a continued pursuit to this day.

Aun aprendo

At the risk of over indulging a metaphor…

There are only ever spaces between the books, gaps to be filled. No shelf is ever large enough, and you often must give some books away to make space for the newly acquired. A sage friend recently offered to fill the gaps in my collection of a certain subject, no light task. It is such a never-ending quest, like enumerating the decimal expansion of real numbers. Luckily my mother put a stop to that when I was 9.37851 years old.

The gaps in my mathematical knowledge were recently evidenced when friend revealed to me using base i. I had never considered using complex numbers in a base system, and I still haven’t. My hangover put a stop to that. Imagine the pain of I and i, the day after too many cocktails, especially with reggae playing softly in the cafe behind us. The cosmic irony was inescapable.

Holes in the film archive of my heart exist too. I will probably be chasing those for decades. Another ever renewing avocation, devouring of time. I find though, that films slot nicely between the books in the library of my mind. In the weightlessness of this analogy, they make great book-ends. My internal editor is putting a stop to this paragraph right now…

To me, being a ploymath or polyhistor, means giving in to endless fascination. Becoming pursuant of luster in the libraries, indulging in card catalogue adventures. It is not really something you can be, something one can only continually reaspire towards.

This is something my mother, my internal editors, and my hangovers, have never put a stop to…