Living Knowledge

One of the best qualities of Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything is that it is so well written. This is wonderful for the aspiring chef, for he needs to return to the book often for reference and assurance, and it’s pleasant to find a voice and personality in the text rather than just the data for ingredients and process. But perhaps the best quality of this particular cookbook is that the author pushes his reader to action. 

Often our knowledge becomes darkened because we fail to put things into practice. For when we have totally neglected to practice something, our memory of it will gradually disappear.

—Mark the Ascetic

Okay, this makes sense: we remember what we do by practice. But ever since “Google” became a verb, it’s easier than ever to find what we’ve forgotten. Which leads to the question: In our ever-expanding human knowledge, what’s worth remembering? And especially since time is limited in a way that knowledge is not, what’s worth remembering by practice?

Perhaps the words of a more modern psychologist, Jamie Moran, can help answer this question: “Western rationalism as always mistakenly valued theory over practice, seeing practice as merely the ‘application’ of theory. But practice is a domain on its own, and so the practitioner discovers things, and undergoes things, that the theoretician either could never have imagined or dreamt of, or even if they were partially foreseen, they prove importantly different when they emerge and are encountered on the ground.”

So what is the knowledge that is so important that you’re willing to have it expanded and yourself changed by putting it into practice?