Close-up considerations

1. It’s only natural for people to suffer much from crippling shyness or from strong belief of being hopelessly unattractive.

2. It’s always a risky business to give advice to people without actually investigating into the cause of the problem.

3. The main shortcoming of the ‘advice columns’ is that you get only one side of the story and you dare advise!

4. Advisers should enter into private correspondence to get more information in order to give more useful advice.

Unit twelve Open-up ideas

1. It’s a good thing if you know an incredible amount about a certain subject or aspect.

2. Everybody admires a person if he is an expert.

3. No one really wants to acquire expertise on a subject like, say, astronomy, zoology or foreign languages.

4. Hard work and single-minded devotion to the study of a subject will invariably lead you to perfection.

Text for discussion

I know a boy called Michael who has a remarkable talent. He knows an incredible amount about football teams and football leagues. He can recite the names of the players, tell you the results of every match played last weekend and who scored the goals, and can give you a potted history of any football club you care to name. What I find most extraordinary of all is that he is as knowledgeable about Spanish and German football as he is about English. He spends an enormous amount of time perusing football magazines and the sports pages of newspapers, making intricate lists, and working out statistics which are much more comprehensive than those which appear in the papers. He is, to put it in a nutshell, an expert on football, although curiously enough he does not play the game himself, and only goes very occasionally to a match. As it happens, he also has a fanatical interest in the history of the First World War. Thanks to a retentive, almost photographic, memory, he now has an encyclopaedic knowledge of that as well.

Everybody admires him for his experience, but I have to admit that, while I am not envious of him for knowing more about football than I do, he does make me feel inadequate. I so much want to be an expert on something, it does not really matter what, as long as I can find about which I know more than anyone else. They say that in studying a subject you go through four stages: at first, you know nothing and you know you know nothing; then, in Stage 2, you know a little and you think you know a lot; in the third stage, you know a lot but you think you know very little; finally, when you reach Stage 4, you know a lot and you know that you know a lot. I never seem to get beyond Stage 1.

Bookstalls at railway stations and airports are designed expressly to seduce you into believing that you can become an expert effortlessly in the time it takes to make your journey. There is always one particularly attractive kind of book on sale; these are pocket-sized paperbacks, always beautifully illustrated in colour, and so cheap that you cannot help buying them. The very simplicity and brilliance of the colours seem to convince you that you can acquire expertise on any subject that takes your fancy-astronomy, zoology, antique-collecting, foreign languages-with no more effort than is required to read the morning paper. There must be a huge sale in these instant-knowledge booklets, and I assume that, if my experience is anything to go by, they are producing a colossal sense of failure in millions of people. I still go on buying them of course, because I could never allow myself to do anything on a journey so trivial as to sleep or to read a thriller. My excuse is that, even if I do not become an expert on, say, meteorology by the time I get to Glasgow, I can always take it up later on. Then I assuage my guilt feelings at having failed so miserably to absorb the wisdom that the book promised by deluding myself that it will be useful for the children to have the book, just in case. I am presumably setting up for the next generation the conditions for an identical sense of failure to my own.

Anyway, how does Michael do it? At 16, he is at Stage 4 in two unrelated fields, apparently without effort. The answer is; hard work and single-minded devotion of his free time to the study of his chosen subject. It is more difficult to say why he does it. I suppose that his interest in football was sparked off originally by some casual event, such as meeting a famous footballer or being taken to a match by a favourite uncle. After that his interest grew, and on the principle that nothing succeeds like success, the more he found out , the more he wanted to find out.

Actually, now that I come to think of it , I have been far too modest. There is one subject about which I know a lot, and that is natural history. On a country walk, I can put a name to most things I come across: birds, flowers, trees, fungi and so on. Wait a minute, though. On second thoughts, perhaps, I have just reached Stage 2.