Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/522



HE acquisition of useless information is more or less the employ of every life that has been well lived. It adds the grace of a superfluity which is not of naughtiness, and imparts a sense of comfortable repletion which does not necessarily imply the swollenness of pride. To know too much is like having too much; one cannot perfectly respect one's self without it: in either case too much is far better than too little; it gives the difference from one's fellows which we call distinction; it inspires the pleasurable consciousness of being set apart in a high place with other people who know too much or have too much, and who are for that reason the best people. Is it not, in fact, in one case the condition which realizes ignorance to us, and in the other case the condition which realizes poverty? Without the one how should we know that we were not ignorant? Without the other, how should we be sure we were not poor? In these matters superfluity—that is to say, uselessness—is the only guaranty of our superiority. All the same, it cannot be indiscriminately praised.

At one time in a career which has not been at all times over roses, we may confide for the purposes of illustration, we were much concerned to know precisely when the night train left Florence for Rome. It might equally have been, for purposes of illustration, a night train leaving Boston for New York; but we are dealing with facts, and the fact is as we have put it. Perhaps it was the season when time-tables are changing, and when nobody, least of all the officials, can say just when a train will or will not leave. At any rate, the greatest difficulty attended our inquiry, both at our hotel and at the station; as for people who had recently been to Rome on the night train, they were of the lower animals as far as time-tabulary intelligence was concerned; one really had to pity them. The affair was all the more trying because we had to be accurate, for if you are not in the train at the moment it leaves Florence, you do not go to Rome. It will not do to arrive at the platform about seven, or about nine; you must be there on the tick. We had this clearly in mind, and our inquiries were exact. By means of great persistence we learned at last that the train left at, say, eight o'clock and ten minutes; and then, strangely enough, we no longer wished to take it.

In fine, our plans had suffered one of those changes to which the plans of travellers are subject throughout the journey of life. We decided first not to go by the night train to Rome, and then we decided not to go to Rome at all, because we had been there twenty years before, and we argued that if Rome were eternal it must also be immutable, and we need not go. But there we were, left with a piece of useless information on our hands, which we had spent so much time and pains in acquiring, and which we found we could not even give away, for nobody else that we knew wished to take the night train for Rome. It was a purely decorative addition to our stock of general knowledge. We cherished it as such for a long time; then it frayed out and fell away. We totally forgot when the night train left Florence for Rome; for though we have said eight-ten, that was for purposes of illustration only; we would by no means affirm that eight-ten was actually the hour.

A piece of information is not entirely useless if you can use it even once only; and if we had taken the night train from Florence to Rome, as we expected, it would have been undeniably well to know when it started. But as we did not take it, the instance became a type of the hardship involved by the acquisition of useless information. Even at the best, we should have gone but once, and the fact of the train leaving Florence at eight-ten would simply have remained to lumber memory forever. The conclusion will suggest itself to the reader. One should think twice before acquiring any sort of information, for there are chances that it may turn out useless in the end if not the beginning.

What is quaintly called education is