Today a fellow teacher asked, “When did you know that you were smart?” My honest, yet glib answer was, “I don’t think I am smart.” Yes, that was a deflection. My second answer, “I’m not smart, everyone else is stupid” was just a smart-ass answer.
I do think that I am smart. Yet I think that somewhere along the line I missed something. I never felt that I was all that smart. I’m not sure even now if I am all that smart. Yes, I was in the excelerated classes in middle and high school. Yes, I was in the Junior and National Honor societies. I made A’s and B’s without trying through out public school. In college I received my B.A. again without trying that hard and doing the usual amount of drinking and partying, and skipping classes; and sometimes more than the usual amount.
When I look back at various events in my life, I think wow that was really a weird gecky thing (translation: smart). I had what I realize now was my first philosophical encounter with language in third grade. I thought, “Nothing has to be something or it wouldn’t have a name.” I read the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings for the first time in 3rd and 4th grade. I didn’t think that was unusual, my older sisters had already read it, and they were what I had to compare myself to, the norm I had at hand. It befuddled me in elementary that others were not as interested in the books I was interested in, or that they took longer to do the assignments in math or social studies. I never thought of myself as smart however.
By sixth grade I met two of my oldest friends, Nathan and Jimmy. Finally some people who had read the same books as me, who were interested in, what I now realize were odd, obscure, games and were willing to spend hours and hours playing them while we talked about the books we were reading. We would embark on projects and have a blast creating sets for the skits or plays we were doing for class. But this was all normal. Normal, not smart. Smart was something else, something beyond what I was able to do.
As a nineteen year old undergraduate, I worked as a dishwasher at Clarksville Wine Shop. I listened to the customers, and the waiters (graduate students) talk about various subjects from wine to art, to music, to politics; and I came to an early cynical idea: pretension is half of the game. With being able to back it all up the other half, thus negating the pretension. I started working on being able to back up what I had to say; being able to do more than just bullshit. I have always read a lot. When some author refers to some other text, and that text keeps coming up, I go and read it. I don’t read someone else’s ideas about that writer, I go read the source. I guess my Lutheran upbringing comes out there: don’t rely on the priests to tell you what the book means, read it yourself. I’ve noticed that most people do not make their own decisions about ideas, they tend to read what others say the ideas mean. When I read “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” for the first time, I was surprised that the infamous quote, “God is Dead.” comes rather early in the work and is not really that important in the work as a whole. Yet that is the line that I would say the majority of people know from Neitsche, if they know any line at all. I read and study because I don’t understand much of life; and for the most part, that simply leads me into deeper confusions and cause for further reading.
Others always seem to know what they are doing, what all the answers are. I don’t understand the world. I am not that smart.
