I know a lot of stuff.

If that sounds like bragging, well, it isn’t. Having a lot of facts in your fact-bag has very little to do with intelligence. I have always said that things stick in my memory because my brain is gummy. Real intelligence is something else.

Oh, I’m smart enough, but I’m no Stephen Pinker. The ability to retrieve a good deal of information is no more something to take credit for than having red hair or a cute button nose. These things were doled out at birth and a retentive memory is just like being dealt cerebral fly paper in the genetic lottery.

It is occasionally lots of fun: There was a time when my second unofficial wife ran a kind of scam, in which she would bet co-workers whether I would know some arcane fact — who was the first secretary general of the UN, for instance — and when I came to pick her up when she got off work, they would stand in a group and ask me the question. Then she would collect her money from everyone else and we would go home.

And even now, when age has made the retrieval of fact slower, it is still gratifying when my granddaughters come to me for help in history and I can give them a comprehensible overview of what they are studying. They call me “Encyclopedia Brown.”

As a side note, one should mention that when younger, this habit could be tiresome — creeping Cliff Clavinism you might call it. It’s surprising how few people desire to be corrected on factual matters that are incidental to the joke they are telling.

Worse, as you get older — age has nothing to do with it, per se, but rather the accumulation of experience, the widening of knowledge through reading and being corrected by the other Cliff Clavin’s of the world out there who know something you don’t — you discover that what once seemed to be a fact is in fact more subtle than you had imagined and that every supposed fact is really just a distillation of prevailing ignorance. As the Firesign Theatre once astutely had it: Everything you know is wrong.

At least, everything you know is more complicated than that. Just how many words for “snow” do Eskimos have? There are doctoral theses waiting to be written, not just on how many words, but on our fascination with the idea that Eskimos have this extended vocabulary.

And then there’s the issue of whether “Eskimo” is a decent word to use. And if we recognize the difference between Inuit and Yupik peoples, how many words do each of them have, and do these vocabularies overlap?

But before I got that deeply into snow — and avoiding the old traveling salesman joke — I meant to bring up something important to this flurry of factoid.

And that is the difference between what I call “fact confetti” and its corollary, the “tree of knowledge.”

As I remember history being taught to me in grade school, it was a pile of disconnected dates and places, battles and kings. We were supposed to remember these things for a test. 1492, 1066, 1620, 1776, 1848, 44 BC, 1939 — and these are just the obvious ones. How about 1618 and the Defenestration of Prague and 1648 and the Treaty of Westphalia? (It is a matter of accounting to figure out just how many times the windows of Prague saw the ejection of undesirable political figures; it seems to have been a popular pastime in that city over the centuries, but the one in 1618 sparked off the Thirty Years War and is the one usually given the title.)

And that is just history. There were disconnected things to remember all through grade school, high school and into college. They filled out curricula for geometry, for chemistry, for drivers’ ed, even for art classes. Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism — we were taught these hiccups of isms, as if they were independently meaningful and discrete.

This is fact confetti, thrown at you like your teacher was Rip Taylor.

I don’t know how anyone should be expected to remember such things, especially when you are young, pimply and lusting after the Betty Ann Rosensteins of the world in their teardrop eyeglasses and braces. Who cared about Ferdinand Magellan or the Holy Roman Empire? This emphasis on the accumulation of fact confetti turned many a young man and woman off of the whole idea of school-learning.

But, you realize, these facts are not discrete, but connected. In fact — so to speak — everything is connected. If you learn the connections, the facts hang there like ripe fruit, ready to be collected. If you have, instead of just dates and places, the central ideas, the basic flow, you can remember that and the facts fall naturally into place.

This is the tree of knowledge — the overriding shape of your subject. If you know the general lines of how revolutions play out, then whether you are seeing the French or Russian versions, you have a template for the expected facts to flop into place. You remember one thing instead of a hundred of them.

It is the bigger ideas that should be taught, not the fact confetti. But how often does this play out in the classroom? Perhaps it has all changed since my time in Charles De Wolf Elementary Purgatory, but I doubt it.

As I have come to know it, there can even be said to be a single Tree of Knowledge, an Yggdrasil of everything, which splits into world-bearing branches we call science, history, art, language, mathematics. This “World Ash Tree” is the axis mundi of all human learning, and in some way is a map of the human mind — mirroring the way we understand. As Andrew Marvell has it, “that ocean where each kind/ Does straight its own resemblance find.” It is the carrefour where the Umwelt meets incoming experience, creating “far other worlds, and other seas.”

This tree is a life-long exercise of horticulture, you plant it young and watch it grow, spreading tendrils and leaves out to the furthest reaches of esoteric knowledge. All the information, all the contradictions and varieties spread out before you. When seen this way you become not arrogant in knowledge, but humble before the immensity of it all. You can never climb the whole tree, but live on this or that branch, seeing the rest of the tree spread out to a rosy-fingered east you can never reach in a single lifetime.

How do you plant the seed for this Tree of Knowledge, unforbidden by any Nobodaddy?

For me, it began with children’s books. The simple knowledge found in a book for children, or for adolescents, gives you all the hooks you need to hang the facts on. As you learn more and more, delve deeper into the subjects and take up first the adult books on the subject and later, the scholarly books, you come to discover that much of what you first learned was wrong, or at least simplified to the degree it was distorted, but the basic outline you got from that early book gave you the shape of the knowledge, and you could unhook one bit of questionable data and replace it with the more sophisticated version. But if you were to dive immediately into the Ph.D. version, you will become instantly lost.

Even as an adult, when I want to learn something in a new field, I will seek out the simplest, most basic or synoptic version of it, knowing full well that much of what I read will turn out to be untrue, or at least undependable. Yet, the basic shape of the knowledge will remain.

This was the gift of such things as the Little Golden Guides of Herbert S. Zim, or the “All About” series of children’s books on dinosaurs or whales. You begin with the simplest learning and build on it — or rather, let it grow from seedling into mighty oak. Parvis e glandibus sapientia.

But it’s not just children’s books: Anything that gives you an overview, like the Durant “History of Civilization” series, all leventy-thousand pages of it. Or Harold Schonberg’s “Lives of the Great Composers,” or Butler’s “Lives of the Saints.” Each is filled with shorthands, even outright errors and sometimes mere fabrications. But it gets you in the door. You begin with Parson Weems and the cherry tree and move on to Marvin Kitman and the expense account.

You can even start with a Hollywood blockbuster. If Peter Ustinov as Emperor Nero gets you into Suetonius or Tacitus, all to the good. I know as a kid, I went from “Cat Women of the Moon” to books by Willy Ley and on to Sir James Jeans (I’m afraid already out of date in 1957) and then a telescope and the Norton Star Atlas. These things all build on one another and inform one another.

More important is the web of interrelations that spreads out from a single entry point. The astronomy of my boyhood opened to the Greek mythology of the constellations, the gold of astronomer Tycho Brahe’s artificial nose (now thought to have been brass instead) and thence to the Periodic Table of Elements, and the strange obsession with gold by the Spanish explorers, the rise of Medieval Islam and its science, the prosecution of Galileo by the Vatican, and thence to the Papal States and the political disunity of Renaissance Italy, the difference between classical and Medieval Latin … and on and on, one thing leading to another. It is all connected. Very like clicking a link in an internet story — although with this signal difference, that I finished the one book before “clicking” on the next.

And each of these excursions tended to illuminate the others: If you follow the general patterns of Renaissance thought and art into the Baroque and then to the 18th and the Romanticism of the 19th, you can see find the same differences in type design from humanist to old style Caslon to the so-called new style Bodoni, and see the same impulses. You can see them in politics, philosophy, in clothing, in historiography, in religion, and even in cookbooks. Knowledge in one area helps to comprehend another. If you were given a few uncredited lines of Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Blake, T.S. Eliot and Derek Walcott, you could arrange them chronologically by their styles: Renaissance, Baroque, 18th Century, Romantic, Modernist and Postmodernist.

Remembering dates has always seemed beside the point; recognizing correspondences is so much more meaningful. As Albert Einstein supposedly said, “If I need a fact, I can look it up.”

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

All the translations in this book are by the author, save only those in passages by books cited in the bibliography.

A few notes about the difficulty of translating the native language of the Kandeni Islands might be in order. Those tiny islands in the Indian Ocean (approximately 2 degrees South and 90 degrees East), and their primary island, Kandei, were undiscovered until 1933 (Cooper and Schoedsack, 1933), and so remote are they that their language and customs seemingly grew in isolation for centuries, if not millennia. A few relics in their language suggest they had contact with cultures in the South Andaman Sea in earlier eras, perhaps related to the extinct Jangil peoples, but in the main, their language is unique.

By far, the primary difficulty in their language is the fact that it has only two verbs, which might best be described as the verb to be and the verb to do, one active, one passive. Every usage is intelligible only in context. The language has nouns with cases, adjectives that mirror those cases and a few prepositions and a few vestigial conjunctions. There are no articles.

This bifurcation of verb is essential to their organization of the world. Things — whatever they are — either be or do. They exist as essences or they exist as agents. Every act is merely a morph of the simple act of doing. Running, speaking, sleeping, eating — they are all seen as variants of a single act.

For the elders who spoke to me, this is taken as obvious: Their mythology (see Chapter 3) revolves around the dichotomy of being and doing, and their gods, if you can call them that (they may also be seen as ancestors), fall into two categories, the “be-ers” and the “do-ers.” These supernatural beings (I use our terminology — they do not make the distinction between natural and supernatural) are at odds, if not at war (the stories vary from family to family).

On first approach, it may appear that the language is simple to the point of being rudimentary, but in fact, with these few elements, it has grown into a language of immense complexity, requiring of its speaker — and listener — not only great subtlety but awareness of its context. The same sentence in the morning may mean something different after the sun begins its descent.

As one might expect, that although there are only two verbs, there are many nouns. The Kandeian people have words for the things of their world, but not static words. A certain plant, for instance, will have a different noun for its seedling, for its fruiting or for its use by native animals. Linguistically, they are different things, even if our Linnean system sees them as merely phases of the same plant. This is true as it is for us, for instance, who think of a boy as different from a man, a puppy as different from a dog. For them, the manioc plant is a different plant before it grows a sufficient tuber. For us, these distinctions are vestigial, for them, they are applied to almost everything in their ecosystem.

The prepositions come in five varieties, describing being above something, under something, around something or in something and finally away from something. There is no before or after: That is expressed by saying something like “I here (to be), he here (to be), and the listener infers from context that the one happened before the other.

Adjectives and adverbs are undifferentiated; they are universal modifiers and no distinction is made between a fast runner and running fast (or in the language “active verb fast.”

A few examples might help.

A standard statement might include first a subject, like the personal pronoun, “I,” followed by the object of the sentence followed by one of the two verbs. If you were to express a simple idea, such as “I throw the ball,” the sentence would be constructed as “I ball (active verb).” Or “I ball do.” The “I” is in the nominative case, the “ball” in the objective. The “do” or “act” is understood as something you do with the ball — which in context would most likely be understood as “throw.” The speaker might mimic the act of throwing, but this is not necessary. If you needed to express something else, such as “I sat on the ball,” you would have to express this with not only the sentence, but with gesture. “I ball (do)” and a short squatting gesture. Why you might want to sit on a ball, I don’t know.

The other verb expresses both condition and essence — both the concepts that in Spanish are divided by “ser” and “estar.” To say “I am here,” the sentence would be built as “I here (to be).” “Here” is in the locative case. Other places would likewise be in the locative. “I river (to be).” There is no tense expressed. Again, tense is implied by context or by extension: “I river yesterday (to be).”

Naturally, such a language can only be meaningful in a face-to-face encounter. The many gestural inflections cannot be captured in print or over a telephone. Neither of which, I hardly need to say, the Kandeian peoples do not have.

When they were discovered by a passing tramp steamer in 1933, it is estimated there were perhaps 400 Kandeian speakers on the island. In the intervening time that number has dropped precipitously; there are now estimated to be under a hundred left, although a precise census has never been taken, in part because the Kandeians resist outside visitors, and in part because the island is so wild and overgrown, cross-country travel is extremely hazardous.

I spent two years on the island in the late 1980s, studying the language and customs. I spoke with several family leaders — a position gained not by force or vote, but by assent — and they told me their stories and the stories of their ancestors. This raises another distinct quality of their language. When discussing everyday events, they speak in an ordinary pitch and volume, as you or I might. But when relating myth, they speak in a high pitch and with little inflection. They can revert back and forth with seemingly no difficulty as they interweave the mythic with the quotidian.

This way of speaking also functions as a kind of subjunctive mood, as it is also used to express things that might not be, or might occur in the future. So, for the Kandeian, linguistically at least, the past — other than a personal past — and the future are equally mythic. In the middle, there is the lifetime remembrance of the speaker, which is taken as indicative rather than subjunctive; all else is relegated to myth, or a time that may have been or might become.

The problems of rendering such a language in English should be manifest. When I translate the words of Ruthentay, leader of his family, I must interpret his meaning into English rather than literally translate. Certainly this is the case when translating from any language to another; the problems of turning Tolstoy into readable English is well known. But with the Kandeian Islander, this is raised to an exponential degree. I cannot just give the words Ruthentay speaks, but must render them as if they had been spoken in English. This distorts them in ways that break my heart, but it cannot be otherwise.

In those cases where no English equivalent exists, as for certain food items of the Kandeian diet, I must use transliterations of the native words. I am sorry if this causes confusion but again, there seems no way around it.

When you are young, starting out in your adulthood, your interests expand, the world widens and you want to breathe it all in. It is all there, in front of you, waiting to be experienced.

If you are of a reasonably intellectual bent, you will devour every new Jonathan Franzen novel, check out the Whitney Biennial, seek out the next Philip Glass opera, sample the new molecular cuisine — perhaps drive a Tesla and test out the Google glasses.

You want to ride the crest of your times, and keep up with your scuttling generation.

I certainly did, when I was young. It was my avowed ambition to “know everything.” And I meant it. (Yes, I recognized the impossibility of taking my goal literally, but that doesn’t change the idealist zeal of it all).

In my day, it meant reading Saul Bellow, seeing Robert Rauschenberg’s “Inferno” at MoMA, grooving on Morton Subotnick’s “Silver Apples of the Moon,” eating tandoori chicken and driving a VW bus.

The world seemed particularly open then, although looking back, I know it was really me who was open. It all rushed in. I could not get enough. Even in high school, I read James Purdy, Thomas Pynchon, Norman Mailer, Hubert Selby Jr. — and all the Bellow I could get my hands on. What I could have made of these writers at the tender age of 16, I have no idea. But I knew I wanted what they had to offer.

By the time I got to college, I had all that under my belt, and I was ready to charge into Chaucer, Wordsworth, Blake, Homer, Sophocles, Melville, Milton, Joyce, Eliot — I was a starving man at the feast of Trimalchio. Handfuls stuffed into my cheeks. I couldn’t chew fast enough.

School certainly opens the world up for those eager for it, but that was hardly the end of it; it was barely the beginning. Since then I’ve run through whole forests of paper splattered with ink. In huge draughts: All of Henry Miller, most of D.H. Lawrence, the obscure parts of Melville, the verbal excesses of Lawrence Durrell — but you get the picture. And that’s just the reading.

I took on Beethoven quartets, not just in listening, but poring over the scores. Mahler symphonies; Mozart operas; Balanchine ballets. Bruckner came late, but I fell hard.

I don’t want to give the impression that it was all old masters, although I did incline that way. I also kept up with Glass, Reich, Adams, learned to love Osvaldo Golijov and kept track of the development of Jennifer Higdon.

The same pattern continued for the visual arts, for poetry, and for travel: I wanted to see everywhere, to learn everything. Linguistics, color theory, whatever part of particle physics that an English major could ingest without coughing up indigestible math.

But things have changed; I am getting old. And when you are old there comes a narrowing of interests.

You come to recognize there will not be time to know everything, to take up Russian and learn the history of Chinese opera, to finish all of Proust or finally visit Uzbekistan. The limits of learning, the limits of a life become tangible. You can see in calendar units the coming end of sentience, the final breath, when you can no longer breathe anything in.

This is not all merely maudlin and depressing. When you get old, the end seems less a tragedy and more a satisfying completion. Herr, lehre doch mich, das ein Ende mit mir haben muss, und mein Leben ein Ziel hat, und ich davon muss, und ich davon muss.

I still want to read new things, see new art, hear new music, but I attack these with less fervor; they are subsidiary to a growing desire to revisit those things I encountered earlier, but now need to consider once again. In part, this is to re-experience things that gave me great pleasure, and it’s pleasure all over again to dive in once more. But it is more that because I am old, I can squeeze more juice out of the old rinds. There is so much in Dante I could not have understood when I was an eager lad. So much in those late quartets that passed me by the first hundred times I listened. 

And so, I find myself rereading things that meant a great deal to me rather than reading new things. Oh, I don’t want to exaggerate this; I still read new things, too. I still want to learn new things and I still tackle new subjects, but without the expectation that I can ever “learn it all.” And those things that have stuck with me — the Iliad, some Shakespeare, the Beethoven quartets, the woodcuts of Hokusai or the films of Renoir — are such a huge reservoir of experience that they can be dipped into over and over and always with new reward.

I remember the complaint that used to be lodged against the famous orchestra conductor Arturo Toscanini. The older he got, the fewer works he programmed. Those who only came to know him from his late recordings could believe he only played the Beethoven and Brahms symphonies over and over and avoided new music. But when he was younger, he gave world premieres of dozens of operas and symphonic works — including Puccini’s “La Boheme” and “Turandot,” and Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci.” When he was young, he championed contemporary music. He was 70 when the NBC Symphony was created for him and close to 90 when he made most of the recordings he is known for — all that Beethoven and Brahms. That narrowing of repertoire should be taken less as a lack of interest in new music, and more as a deepening of his immersion in that music he loved most deeply.

This is a pattern I recognize and while I might have made apologies for it when I was younger, I have come to understand it as it has happened to me, also.

I remember when my friend Dimitri Drobatschewsky approached 90, he often talked about the coming end, and how much he had appreciated all the experience that he had managed to pack into his very full life, and how he relished rehearing the music that had meant so much to him when he was younger. He felt it was up to a fresh generation to come to love newer music, and that his Strauss and Mahler were enough to support him as his tide receded. There was no sense of resignation in his declaration, but clearly a recognition of limitation. We are all limited. It’s just that when we are younger, we don’t know it.

A smaller and smaller pool of art and literature becomes infinitely large and expansive, and instead of thinking there is too much to know in the world, you realize there is even too much to know just in Chaucer.

I am not arguing against Franzen, or against Idina Menzel or Ai Weiwei; I am just saying that I leave those treasures for younger minds, who, when they get older, will reread and rehear and resee in those works the complex meanings and awakenings that are undoubtedly buried there.

As for me, I’m rereading “Herzog” now to find out what I missed when I was a pimply-faced kid.