The Norrington Room

Anyone who has ever had to undertake a significant essay assignment, or even a minor research project, is likely to have encountered the following situation. You are about to embark on the final write-up, and are perhaps just checking the last couple of references, when you discover that there is a whole other approach to the subject, perhaps an opposing stance or a closely related piece of work, whose existence until now you had not suspected. At best you’ll need an extra paragraph, a small insert; at worst, a complete re-write. Or you casually mention to someone what it is you’re doing, and they instantly respond with “Have you read X’s book?”, of which, naturally, you have not heard. “Oh yes, you must read X”. Can you dare not to?

The phenomenon can strike at different times and in different ways, with unpredictable outcomes, but it’s a general consequence of information overload - one of my tiresome themes - of the too-muchness of knowledge, of the difficulty of trying to keep up, and of the problem of trying to funnel the vast amount of what is “out there” into the comparatively extremely limited contents of what you want to have, understand and remember “in here”.

Or perhaps it’s just me. Me being “driven”, as a friend says I am. Well, either you are driven or you drift. I recall that around the age of eleven, when I was precociously obsessed with chemistry, and chemical names (the odder and more obscure the better - rare earths like dysprosium, ytterbium, and lutetium, inert gases like krypton and xenon), of going into the immense circular chamber of Manchester Central Library and finding an entire book about the element rhenium, which had only been discovered in the 1920s, is extraordinarily rare, and even today is not much use to man or beast. How could there be so much to know about something like that?  Then perhaps a year later, getting into organic chemistry and developing an obsession with alkaloids (brucine and veratrine were phonetic favourites), I visited the Picton Library in the centre of Liverpool and found a multi-volume text on the subject, stretching half way along a shelf. Shell-shocked, depressed and defeated I exited and wandered into the gardens across the road, sniffing the ambient hoppy smell, avoiding the winos and the weirdos, and trying to take stock.

As I say, the response to such unfair amounts of unsuspected knowledge is unpredictable. One may be spurred on or flattened down into the ground. Luckily I was at the age when, after these library-based setbacks, I was motivated to study chemistry properly, leading into some sort of career. Though I understood the subject reasonably well, and passed the necessary exams, very early on I realised that I enjoyed the mouthfeel of the terminology, the poetry of the nomenclature, the exoticism of the subject matter, and the visual appeal of molecular structures more than I did the explanatory theory or practical applications of the subject. Soon I recognised that I wasn’t cut out for a practical job in research or anything hands-on, but what I was able to pursue, was a career in information relating to scientific subjects – a kind of meta-science, I suppose. In time I could become an information scientist. I could talk the talk but I wouldn’t have to walk the walk. Or some such contemporary nonsensical non-explanation.

Maintaining motivation in the face of an impossible cognitive onslaught is always difficult, and it’s analogous to the dilemma of the collector; how can you amateurishly collect and admire your puny gap-toothed efforts when you know that somewhere the whole lot exists. Why bother? Before chemistry, philately had been a hobby, but my enthusiasm wasn’t helped by knowing that the Royal Family had just about everything available in the stamp world, that Stanley Gibbons in the Strand certainly did, and so did the National Postal Museum, and the Tapling Collection in the British Museum. Under such circumstances the sensible thing to do is to give up; the wonderful thing is that so many don’t. Nor do they while fully aware that conventional encyclopaedias, or Google or Wikipedia, "know everything". The point being that we want to take it on board, to have it "in here". We want it - stamps or knowledge - to be ours.

Fast forward to the present. Yesterday it was very hot in Oxford, and the city was full of tourists. It occurred to me that being a tourist is slightly like my juvenile approach to chemistry; you can enjoy the good bits, the pretty bits, without the long hard slog of actually having to learn anything properly. It’s neither walking the walk nor talking the talk, and for the tourists in question it appears mostly to consist of taking selfies. 

Never mind. Into Blackwell’s bookshop, and into the famous Norrington Room. I've been there before, and I knew what I was letting myself in for. It looks like this:

And if that isn’t an illustration of information overload I don’t know what is. I was reminded of Ian Dury’s profound song lyrics, “There ain’t ‘alf been some clever bastards”. Indeed, and most of them felt compelled to write. 

Intimidated by the immensity and intensity of it all, but feeling that I ought to benefit from my visit to this amazing bookshop, and in particular to make good use of an extensive 3 for 2 offer, I emerged into the heat with three feeble popular paperbacks. Fairly happily - only a modicum of guilt - I considered it a sensible admission of defeat. Now, I no longer have to pass exams, I'm not even expected to know anything at all; I can be a knowledge tourist.