One Wandering Jew

A shout-out to all the other dilettantes out there. Those of us who merrily skip from one thing to another are often accused of a lack of seriousness about our passions. In these pages, you’ve read me writing about Victor Wembanyama and politics and UFOs and competitive eating and consciousness and personal finance and I have happily provided my uninformed takes on all of it. My interests are voluminous but my depth of knowledge regarding any of them is circumscribed by the fact that I keep darting off to investigate something else that catches my eye. Classic dilettante bullshit.

We get a bad rap, we lovers of novelty. We are often made to feel unserious about our passions because our wide field of interests demands we flit from one thing to another, circling back on some, discarding others. We’re like intellectual butterflies, tracing jittery patterns across the years.

And, to be honest, for a long time I felt bad about it because all of my wanderings left me feeling a bit like a fraud. I can have a conversation about practically any topic for a good eight to twelve seconds before my knowledge base exhausts itself. Nobody will seek me out for expert advice about anything because I am not an expert in anything. Nor am I a “jack of all trades” because my interests don’t extend to competence in any of them.

My obsessions are usually intense and short-lived. A few weeks here, a couple weeks there. For a while, I was passionate about Class A RVs. Those are the big 40’ recreational vehicles you see on the highways. Was I ever going to purchase one? No. What the hell am I going to do with a giant bus? Go somewhere??? Uh, no thanks. But I spent every available minute learning everything I could about them. Until, for no particular reason, I lost all interest.

(Yesterday, though, I saw a pretty sweet Entegra Cornerstone on the highway. That’s a sweet Class A right there.)

“Dilettantism” has a naturally negative tone, calling to mind foppish French minor nobility giggling at court. One tends to treat such people as frivolous, but I don’t feel frivolous any more than the butterfly thinks of itself as frivolous when nothing could be further from the truth – by God, they’ve got butter to fly!

I, too, feel as though I have butter to fly. I am compelled to do these things by a somewhat restless mind. Whenever I get too deep into something, my attention gets pulled somewhere else. I then spend however long ruminating on that thing before I am called elsewhere. A real wandering Jew, I am.

Perhaps it would be better to reframe myself as an amateur. Amateurism doesn’t have the same whiff of superficiality as dilettantism. The word “amateur” comes from the Latin amare, which means to love. We amateurs do things for the love of doing them. We may not have any special talent, but nor do we seek any sort of remuneration. We just do stuff. We delve into things from natural curiosity. We do not flit, we ramble. Our amateurism is the propellant with which we power our love of life. I mean, how could we give ourselves over to any one thing when there’s so much fascinating stuff out there?

Personally, I can’t do it and it reminds me of the parable of the bowmaker who stopped making bows once he mastered the art. Why continue doing that which you cannot do any better? Or I think about the 2011 documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, which tells the story of Jiro Ono’s lifelong quest for sushi perfection. The way the rice is washed, the way the fish is cut, the way the chopsticks are arranged on the table. The deep care and thought that goes into all of it. As much as I admired his process, the film left me wanting to jump out of my skin.

Maybe it’s why I like hiking. Purposeful walking is a good activity for the amateur. The act of putting one foot in front of the other does more than transport the hiker from point to point. Each footfall creates a new journey, if you’re willing to pay attention. The trails are in constant flux and one can read the story of the forest as it unfolds step by step. I should clarify: I mean a more polished observer of the natural world than myself could do such a thing. Not me. I am, after all, a dilettante.