Several years ago I took a young woman of my acquaintance to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Green-Wood Cemetery combined two of my keenest interests – death and birds – and my plan was to stroll the winding paths, pausing at the more notable crypts and maybe spotting a few kestrels and grosbeaks. One of my earliest memories of Green-Wood was of an idyllic ramble there twenty-three years earlier with the girlfriend who became my wife. That memory wasn’t so happy anymore, and now that I was single I might have had a little too much invested in this casual outing – “date” was too strong a word. Anya was, alas, just my type – smart, very hip, always dressed in black, and luscious. We met on a perfect May morning just inside the cemetery gates. In my eagerness, I explained to Anya that Richard Upjohn, better known as the architect of Trinity Church on Wall Street, had designed the gates, with their spires topping a high relief ensemble of the Resurrection and of the Raising of Lazarus, as one of the culminating expressions of the Gothic Revival in America. I particularly liked the red sandstone surfacing and the flying buttresses supporting the central steeple.“Really? How fascinating! Stephen, how can you know so much?” Such were the words Anya did not speak. She didn’t say anything, and didn’t need to. I could read her thoughts all too clearly in the pained silence that followed. And what she thought was this: How could any human being possibly be so boring?O.K., maybe I was trying too hard. Nonetheless, if I had passed off my knowledge with relaxed fluency, as I am sometimes capable of doing, I believe that Anya would have looked no less stunned or annoyed.  I belong to the last generation – maybe the last graduating class – educated to believe that bodies of knowledge in history, literature, the arts, philosophy, political science, and even the more accessible reaches of the sciences, were to be mastered, or at least assimilated, not as ends in themselves but as the foundation upon which critical thinking and creative endeavor depended. Anya, on the other hand, had been educated to believe that everything I held dear was rot. What foundation? It had never existed. The “canon” that I considered necessary and inevitable was neither. To Anya, listening to me natter on about the Gothic Revival and other concepts that couldn’t have meant less to her or to the world outside the cemetery gates, I must have sounded like George Eliot’s superannuated pedant Casaubon in Middlemarch. Perhaps I could have redeemed the situation with a self-deprecating witticism about my Casaubon-like tendencies, but there would have been no point. She wouldn’t have got the joke.I believe that Anya’s generation got it half right. “Mastering” bodies of knowledge was as likely to be oppressive as liberating, especially (by their lights) where dead white males were concerned. While I benefited from the exposure to great minds that college afforded me, I sure would have been spared a lot of agony if I hadn’t had to read Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde in Middle English. Furthermore, the shaming awareness of my ignorance, drilled into my head by several of my professors, did nothing to shore up my shaky, late adolescent psychology. A more relaxed and open-ended approach to the teaching of undergraduates is by no means to be regretted, even if some rigor is necessarily sacrificed. I need to remind myself that the exclusion of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock from undergraduate syllabi does not signify the ruin of civilization. I never really enjoyed that poem until I was in my mid twenties, when I finally knew enough to get the jokes without having to read the footnotes. And if you can’t enjoy it, as it never would have occurred to me to ask in my college days, what’s the point?Anya’s teachers won the culture wars of the eighties and nineties, but theirs was a pyrrhic victory. Just when they finally succeeded in removing Alexander Pope from the syllabus, few people much cared anymore. Remember the good old days on campus when people got riled up over Michel Foucault? Now they get riled up over Mark Zuckerberg or some other entrepreneurial guru. Those few literary/humanistic types bucking the trend, when seemingly all around them are studying the most severely practical of disciplines, most designed to earn them pots of money sooner rather than later, must feel very special or totally beleaguered. In that case, why not feel special? Like Anya, today’s humanities students may not know much about the Gothic Revival or Edward Casaubon, but their investment in culture will reward them with a lifetime of passionate appreciations and just possibly a slightly higher allotment of self knowledge than the norm. They can pick up on Casaubon and the Gothic Revival later, if they choose. (And I can pick up, as I have, on Zora Neale Hurston, who certainly was not on any syllabus that I ever saw.) A little or even a lot of ignorance here or there is no barrier to a life of the mind. You can live a life of intense intellectual curiosity and still be ignorant of a thousand important things. Just look at me.Educational and intellectual fashions change. I would like to say that culture remains constant, except that would make me sound like Edward Casaubon. What I mean is that however vapid the cultural productions of any given moment, the urge to create endures. Eventually the crap gets filtered out, even if most people will always prefer a good football game to a museum visit. Or a mud wrestling match to – I know this is hard to believe – the late novels of Henry James. Sometimes I'm one of those people. Anyone as rabid as I am for the music of ZZ Top is not in a position to cast aspersions on those drawn to the more immediate gratifications of popular culture. I like to think that Beethoven would have dug ZZ Top. Maybe not, but he certainly didn’t disdain the folk music of his day. It’s there in the Pastoral Symphony, for example, which incorporates a melody from a Yugoslav folk dance that he would have heard from Hungarian bagpipers. The greatest art never divorces itself completely from the lives of ordinary people, or if you prefer, The People. Still, no amount of wishful thinking – nor any amount of coolly ironic pop art or postmodern appropriation -- can ever overcome basic distinctions of high and low. If you think those distinctions are stuffy Victorian relics, you probably haven’t done jury duty lately. When I last served a few years ago, I learned a lot about Beyoncé, Dancing with the Stars, and Vin Diesel movies. My fellow jurors did not care to discuss that season’s offerings at the Museum of Modern Art or the contents of the latest New York Review of Books. Perhaps I could be faulted for not introducing those topics, but you’d be surprised how much I can say about Vin Diesel movies when push comes to shove.Nor will any amount of wishful thinking overcome basic distinctions of class. How shall I put it? The working class tends not to be interested in Virginia Woolf. Woolf herself was no shining democrat (Joyce’s Ulysses was to her the “illiterate, underbred book . . . of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are”), but most of her readers today come from the educated middle class – or rather, from the slim minority of that class that genuinely prefers challenging modernist fiction to cookbooks. I myself – utterly middle class, a product of public schools and state colleges – worship Virginia Woolf. As far as I'm concerned, I have as much right to sniff the hothouse flowers of Bloomsbury as Vanessa Bell did. My educational background might have helped get me over the garden wall, but money had nothing to do with it. Money never has anything to do with it, if by “it” we mean everything that matters in life: love, honor, Virginia Woolf, ZZ Top, and a passionate devotion to culture that defines highbrow existence.So if there is a high and a low, I'm securely on the high end of the scale. Me, a highbrow? Surely I flatter myself. There’s a lot more I don’t know than I do, starting with most languages other than my own, chamber music, Byzantine art, analytical philosophy, and even pretty basic geography. In the eyes of someone like Janet Malcolm, I'd probably rate at best as a middlebrow with pretensions. Still, none of us live our lives, or should live our lives, in reference to the opinions of others. I read about four hours a day (down from nine in college), attend Yasujiro Ozu retrospectives at Film Forum, walk city streets with architectural guidebooks in hand, and cry at good productions of Shakespeare’s comedies. I’ve long since passed the age of trying to impress anyone. I do these things because I find meaning and fulfillment in them or maybe just because I can’t imagine doing anything else. It’s not as if there’s a bar exam to pass. I'm a highbrow because I say so.  If you’re reading this journal, you’re a highbrow too.Take architecture as a case in point. Really, what the hell do I know about Richard Upjohn and the Gothic Revival? In fact, I misinformed Anya on that May morning when I held forth in Green-Wood Cemetery. It wasn’t Richard Upjohn who designed the entrance gates; it was his son, Richard Michell Upjohn. And that’s not even to mention the structural stuff, the real architecture. Once an English major, always an English major. Most technical vocabularies give me the willies, and no discipline has a vocabulary more technical than that of architecture. Modillion, machicolation, ogive, ogee, random ashlar: I know what some of these terms mean, but I’ve forgotten them before and I’ll forget them again. Hence my rule of thumb in acquiring any new architectural guidebook: Does it have a glossary?You know you’re an amateur when what really turns you on are the interiors. The professionals reserve their greatest concern for the exteriors, where the austere geometries of form engage their practiced eyes. Marbled foyers, parquet flooring, mosaic backsplashes: no professional training is required to apprehend the beauty of these surface appurtenances. How disappointing that most architecture books seem to break down the exterior/interior discussion to a ratio of about three to one. Couldn’t it be the other way around? After all, we live on the inside, not the outside. My architectural primitivism has its reasons. One thing about reading architecture criticism – or marrying, as I did, an architect – is that you learn what buildings you’re not supposed to like. Sometimes I pass the test, sometimes I don’t. On my first visit to Rome not long ago, I was quite taken with an enormous Beaux-Arts palace near my hotel – a bit overwrought, admittedly, but carrying its massing with a dignity appropriate to its civic function. Oops. No wonder the Palace of Justice (Palazzo di Giustizia) went unindexed in the various guidebooks I consulted. The only one to mention it, the exhaustive The Rome Guide: Step by Step through History’s Greatest City (Interlink Books, 2012), noted merely in a few terse sentences that the building was so hated at the time (and ever after) that the architect killed himself in shame shortly after its completion. On the other hand, I needed no architectural authority to tell me that the colossal monument to King Victor Emanuel on the Capitoline Hill was all wrong – blindingly white in a city of aged, ocher marble and arrogantly lording it over other, simpler structures that surpassed it in every respect.So is that what architectural sophistication means – knowing what buildings you’re supposed to like and not like, according to people who know a lot more about the subject than you ever will? I hope not. Architecture merits close study, even if amateurs like me sometimes get it wrong and miss the finer points, for the reasons that all culture merits close study: to take nothing for granted, to resist complacency, to notice things, to be more awake, to be more alive. Close study of skateboarding may well provide the same advantages; I really couldn’t say. Maybe what matters as much as the things we love is the quality of attention we bring to the things we love.Still, architecture does have it over skateboarding in at least once respect. Not everyone skateboards, whereas almost everybody lives in buildings. Nor does everyone read poetry or play the harpsichord. However high or low your brow, you still need a roof over your head. No wonder great architects are so full of themselves. We would die without them, and they know it. More than almost any other art, architecture – at least domestic architecture – bridges high and low. Purity of line and the exigencies of plumbing carry equal weight in a well-designed house.  Furthermore, even the most forbiddingly modernist  “machine for living” recognizes and responds to our primal need for shelter and security.Which is why a visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house in Pennsylvania is so moving. It’s not just the architecture, which is every bit as glorious as you might imagine. It’s the people responding to the architecture. Except for the occasional harried parent or bored teenager, most visitors are manifestly awe-struck. Given that about 135,000 people visit Fallingwater every year, that’s a lot of awe-struck people. Some of these visitors are imperious architecture professors from the University of Pennsylvania, but most are ordinary, badly dressed American tourists like me. Many express their excitement quite volubly.  No wonder.  You almost need to shout to be heard over the incredible roar of the river that courses under the living room. I was there in early spring, when the water ran especially high. The house must feel (and sound) very different in fall or winter, but that’s the whole point, in a way. Fallingwater doesn’t just change with the seasons. It seems to grow out of the earth itself, to take form from the rock and water that encompass it. In fact, if you walk around the back you’ll see that the whole thing is nailed into a rock face; if the rock ever shifted, the house would be lost. I think it was this sense of the chthonic or the telluric that most surprised and delighted the crowds I witnessed at Fallingwater. However, they didn’t use words like “chthonic” or “telluric.” Only I did that. I told you I was a highbrow.If you prefer an atmosphere of reverent silence in your architectural experiences, you can do no better than to visit Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. Here garrulous American enthusiasm gives way to low murmurings, largely in German (at least on the day that I was there). Also, it’s not crowded. Large numbers of people would spoil the Zen-like tranquility of the space. As it happens, large numbers of people do not wish to visit Louis Kahn buildings. I felt a little unworthy, having squeezed in a visit on my way out to the desert for a bird watching expedition rather than having traveled halfway across the globe specifically for that purpose. What were the reverent Germans saying? Maybe something about the almost spiritual quality of the light that suffuses the courtyard where Kahn’s cubist office buildings stand in faceted symmetry. Or something about that rivulet that runs down the courtyard in its slender channel to the sea, as if an archetype of all rivers running to all seas. To talk about Louis Kahn intelligibly, it might help to be either a mystic or a construction engineer. Being neither, I can only point to that strange quality of numinous practicality that characterizes his buildings. Do I fully understand them? Certainly not. Do I even like them? Well yes, but their severity can seem slightly inhuman. To go all the way with Louis Kahn you have to disdain ornament and love poured concrete more than I can manage. The great voids of his Center for British Art at Yale University are thrilling; but I wouldn’t mind a little, you know, filigree.Maybe one day I’ll attain to the kind of understanding of architectural form that conduces to the rapture experienced by Kahn’s murmuring German devotees. Culture is not an all or nothing proposition. For now I count myself lucky that I’ve stood on the courtyard of the Salk Institute and looked down at the Pacific from a view framed by Louis Kahn’s radiant geometries. That’ s more than many people will ever get out of his work. Many years ago I flew to Rochester, New York, to visit my sister and her family, who had recently moved there. Aside from cooing over the new baby, there really wasn’t much to do, and I was hoping my brother-in-law – by no means a lowbrow – would take me to see Kahn’s First Unitarian Church.“You don’t mean that church on South Winton Road? The one that looks like a bunch of boxes pushed together?”“Well, it’s considered a pretty important work of architecture,” I replied. “I'd kind of like to see it for myself.”“There’s nothing to see, Stephen. You must be thinking of someplace else.”I never did get to see the church. The nearest I came was a high definition video screening at a Kahn exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.  There, as the camera slowly panned over the serene, light-suffused tabernacle, I beheld it with a crowd of museum goers who were either greatly impressed or doing a good job of pretending to be. What else would you expect? We were all highbrows.I readily grant that my knowledge of architecture, as of opera, painting, philosophy, theater, film, and most branches of literature, is severely limited. But after all, I'm not leading tours of Louis Kahn’s First Unitarian Church of Rochester or setting myself up as an authority on anything. In the way that Freud advised us to make friends with death (still working on that), I’ve made friends with my ignorance. I could argue that a certain amount of ignorance stimulates the imagination; unencumbered with burdensome erudition, the mind is forced to take imaginative leaps and becomes more nimble in the process. There’s also the idea of ignorance as purity, of being rather than knowing; a notion pithily expressed by Yeats in the lines:

I would be – for no knowledge is worth a straw –Ignorant and wanton as the dawn.

My ignorance, I'm afraid, is nothing so grand as either of these conceptions. I'm ignorant firstly because I don’t have enough time to read what I want to read and secondly because once I’ve read it I usually forget it anyway. Hence the importance of Pierre Bayard’s How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (Bloomsbury, 2007). If a respected psychoanalyst and literature professor (where but in France could one person be the same?) can cheerfully admit to forgetting nearly everything of substance about the great books he has read, so can I. All I can recall of Crime and Punishment – read on a winter break in my freshman year, when I had no business messing around with Dostoevsky – is Raskolnikov, a nasty old lady, and an axe. Can I reasonably claim to have read it at all?  Mais oui! Not only that, but according to Bayard I'm eligible to participate in any discussion about Dostoevsky, not excluding conversations about The Possessed, The Idiot, and other works that I can’t even claim to have forgotten (“HB, books I have heard of,” to use Bayard’s formulation). Since I’ve already forgotten most of Bayard’s arguments, he would forgive me if I’ve got the details wrong, but I seem to recall his essential points as being: (1) our memories are hopelessly fallible; and, (2) culture is a conversation open to all, not just to a clerisy of self-appointed guardians. Admittedly, the conversation will run more smoothly if the conversants know some of the basic parameters, which might include familiarity with the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky or, failing that, familiarity with the way people talk about Fyodor Dostoevsky. But honestly, folks, are you going to let a mere technicality like your spotty memory of Crime and Punishment or perhaps the fact that you’ve never read it at all preclude you from a conversation about the Russian novel or the ontology of the self or great axe murders in literature? And if you feel that you must read Dostoevsky in order to talk about him, you’re going to miss the conversation about Montaigne (another great forgetter) or Proust or the Harlem Renaissance going on in the next room. What Bayard says about books applies to all of culture: you will never catch up. Better to run with what you’ve got than to keep cramming for the midterm exam that you can only fail.I’ve forgotten a lot more than just Dostoevsky. Musical modalities, Middle English, Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (“SB, books I have skimmed”): only so much dross, I'm afraid. Nevertheless, all these cultural markers still live inside my head, forming a neural network of connection and association. I know where the pieces fit. Little by little, as if by osmosis, each cultural artifact that I’ve absorbed (and forgotten) has enriched my consciousness and sharpened my intellect. I find that I can talk to almost anyone about almost anything because I generally know just enough about any topic (theology, linguistics, the life cycle of the horseshoe crab, you name it) to be able to bullshit convincingly, but more importantly because I'm interested in almost everything. Would a diet of low to middle consumptions have furnished me with a like catholicity? I doubt it. Such curiosity as I have barely survived the over exposure to television that blighted my childhood; any further down that road and I'd probably be settled on my sofa this moment watching the most barbarous reality TV program with unmixed delight. It wasn’t pop culture or more respectable diversions like public television that shook me up, stirred my soul, and liberated me from the prison of the here and now. It was Melville, Mozart, Rousseau, and a few hundred other names – imperfectly understood, fitfully appreciated – who did that for me.All these books and pictures and poems and great debates have made my life richer, not easier. I’ve had no more luck than the next hapless Everyman at avoiding the usual landmines along the way. When love or friendship fails, all the culture in the world seems slightly beside the point. What you need is kindness and concern, a kiss and a touch, not an improved edition of Yeats’s Collected Poems. Still, over the long haul, a life lived with your head in the clouds does afford certain practical advantages. I once had a friend – warm, witty, and with a degree from Berkeley, no less – whose exclusive frame of reference was British and American pop culture from about 1975 to date, that is, the television and rock music of the world he had been born into. I had to remember when talking to Alistair to purge all references to Johannes Vermeer or Willa Cather or the Mughal Empire or all the other names and proper nouns that fill my head and sometimes inform my speech – he simply wouldn’t have heard of any of them, and made no bones about it. Alistair wouldn’t have wanted to live my life any more than I wanted to live his, but while my bookishness afforded him much comic diversion (“Hamlet – when that car crashes over the cliff and goes up in a fireball? Love it!”), it seemed to me that Alistair’s adamantine incuriosity left him exposed in ways that I was not. Always restless and usually bored, he could find nothing in his world of Saturday Night Live skits and Guns n’ Roses albums to engage his attention for long, so he bounced around New York, sampling its various amusements and talking up women much younger than himself. Doesn’t sound so bad, actually, but when the women keep saying no, it helps to have something to fall back on that is larger, more encompassing, than the self. (And not God either. Alistair was an atheist by instinct, I by a youthful encounter with David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.) No stranger to loneliness or depression myself, I at least had the consolation when times got hard of knowing that the world didn’t begin and end with my sorrows. Culture is a river that binds me to the living and the dead. Yes, I'd rather have a beautiful woman to dally with, but in the meantime there are some Jane Austen novels I'd love to reread. When Alistair needed to escape from himself, he had nowhere to go.  In terms of emotional damage suffered or caused, we were just about neck and neck, but he had one monster to wrestle with that I didn’t: He was bored. I wasn’t.Personally, I was a bit miffed when I discovered in late adolescence that the world was more interesting than I was, but that discovery has sustained me ever since. Although I know enough about boredom in a theoretical sense to appreciate its importance in, say, the work of Samuel Beckett, it’s something I’ve rarely experienced. Partly that’s because I find life too damn hard to be boring but it’s also because of my highbrow dispositions. Samuel Johnson said he who is tired of London is tired of life. Whereas I say he who is tired of seeing Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy for the third time or won’t wait in the rain outside the Frick Collection for the rare chance to see a Piero della Francesca from Lisbon – that person may or may not be tired of life, but that person is definitely not me. Plenty of people think I'm pretentious. I don’t mind. I know how to think, I know how to talk, and I'm not bored.____Stephen Akey is the author of College, Library, and A Guide to My Record Collection. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.Image of Greenwood Cemetery gates by ConSullivan.