I've read Villehardouin's chronicle of the Fourth Crusade at least two times, maybe three. And yet if I had to write down everything I remember from it, I doubt it would amount to much more than a page. Multiply this times several hundred, and I get an uneasy feeling when I look at my bookshelves. What use is it to read all these books if I remember so little from them?
I've gone through this exact anxiety. Access into past experiences (whether they're books, vacations, or pieces of visual art) isn't random-access. We seem to have a lot of on-demand knowledge but struggle to retain deep knowledge of something in an independent, self-encapsulated state. Depth of knowledge seems to form, in us, emergently and subconsciously. It makes a case for the Buddhist argument that all things are interconnected and interdependent; certainly, in our knowledge bases, that becomes true very quickly.
For me, the solution was to learn to enjoy the process of learning rather than completed act of having acquired knowledge, it being difficult to summarize any acquired knowledge without coming up with a trite, denatured reduction. It took a while because I was secure in the realization that, yes, I had read that 500-page book even if I couldn't reproduce more than a few pages of "raw" and independent knowledge.
I've gone through this exact anxiety. Access into past experiences (whether they're books, vacations, or pieces of visual art) isn't random-access. We seem to have a lot of on-demand knowledge but struggle to retain deep knowledge of something in an independent, self-encapsulated state. Depth of knowledge seems to form, in us, emergently and subconsciously. It makes a case for the Buddhist argument that all things are interconnected and interdependent; certainly, in our knowledge bases, that becomes true very quickly.
For me, the solution was to learn to enjoy the process of learning rather than completed act of having acquired knowledge, it being difficult to summarize any acquired knowledge without coming up with a trite, denatured reduction. It took a while because I was secure in the realization that, yes, I had read that 500-page book even if I couldn't reproduce more than a few pages of "raw" and independent knowledge.