Reading:

Josh Zlatkus:

"A friend recently told me that I’m incapable of original thought. “You’ve read too much,” he said. “Everything that comes to your mind is from someone else.”

He’s right that there are tradeoffs to knowing things. When we accept an idea as fact, we gain a foundation for further thought. We can stop asking one question and move on to the next. The downside, of course, is that competing answers to the original question largely disappear. A person working on the twenty-ninth floor of a building must assume the previous twenty-eight are sound.

Original thinkers seem able to do something unusual: they reach the upper floors without losing access to the ones below. They possess a large repository of knowledge but remain capable of reopening the questions on which that knowledge rests. They know a great deal without becoming trapped by what they know.

I think this is because, in an original thinker’s mind, many of the ideas others treat as settled remain provisional. They can build on an answer without forgetting that another answer was possible, much as a chess player keeps several lines in view. That is how the original thinker combines a large inheritance with the freedom to rearrange it.

Acquiring that freedom usually requires a long period of intellectual apprenticeship. Most thinking seems to fall into one of two categories: original thoughts with too little context or well-founded thoughts that belong to someone else. As Samuel Butler wrote, “Everyone has a mass of bad work in him which he will have to work off and get rid of before he can do better.”

Few people ever make it. As Thoreau wrote, “Only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion.” Whether I’ll get there, I have no idea. But I have to say: I’m enjoying the attempt immensely."