THE EYE OF DESIRE AND THE PILOT OF THE SOUL

Simon Winchester will be 79 in September. It’s possible that, like the artist Hokusai, he thinks his best and most productive years will be his 80s and 90s. But Knowing What We Know (HarperCollins) has a bookend feeling about it: a distinguished author and journalist paying tribute to the thing that has sustained him all his life – the pursuit of knowledge. It’s a kind of love letter to the people, ideas and inventions that have advanced our understanding of the world –one that many writers would like to write, I suspect.

In nearly 400 pages, Winchester covers science, the arts, technology, media, philosophy and neuroscience, among many other topics. The big absent guest at the word feast is religion. His references to the Bible, for example, are about how it was produced, in the chapter on disseminating knowledge through the printed word. The theology of knowing – from the Christian equating of knowledge with the Fall, to the strange intellectual silence that fell on the Islamic world (previously the most intellectually dynamic and curious of the great religions) in the Middle Ages – these are things I’d like Winchester’s compendious mind to address.

The trouble is, there is already too much in here. Knowledge touches everything; and that allows Winchester to go deeply into whatever interests him while still leaving the reader with the feeling he’s only scratching the surface.

Sometimes, the weight and scope of his subject matter weigh heavily on the prose. The last thing I expected from such a seasoned a writer (and, let’s not forget, reporter) was a ponderous sentence such as this: “A hint of an answer can be found in what is known from early literature of the human attitude to one specific and always distant geographical feature…” The sentence goes on for another three lines before he reveals he’s talking about the horizon. A very distant horizon it is too.

At this stage (page 46) I wasn’t getting on with the book at all and was wishing the one thing reviewers must never, ever wish: that someone else had taken on this book. The someone else I had in mind was Bill Bryson. What saved it, and me, was the moment when Winchester visits an Indian woman he’d known while reporting on the Bangladesh war in 1971. Shukla Bose had moved to Bangalore and set up informal classrooms for slum children. Winchester writes beautifully and movingly about the project – and a somewhat stuttering book suddenly sparks into life. He shows us why knowledge matters and where it can take the least fortunate of its bearers.

In truth, there are several books in here. There is the autobiography of a single, gifted man and his relationship with knowledge. There is the science of learning and the means of conveying it. There’s ethics: should Roosevelt have shut down the growing knowledge of nuclear fusion in the 1930s?

But my favourite book-within-the-book comes is made up of the pen portraits of the men and women who have most advanced our knowledge of the world. Among the familiar names (Aristotle, Confucius, Diderot) are many you may not have heard of, or have forgotten about: Andrew Bell (encyclopaedias), Cai Lun (paper), William Guier and George Weiffenbach (GPS). Winchester may be an Englishman resident in the United States, but his years working in Asia mean the narrative is never lopsided towards the West.

This is a book that lacks a strong central thesis: but deserves a wide audience for its timeliness as well as its indefatigability. It’s published in a year when the subterranean rumbling about AI has exploded: and the eruption’s name is ChatGPT. It’s published a year before a man who lies about everything and who has branded the truthseekers and knowledgepurveyors as fakes stands again for president of the United States. Knowing what we know in 2023, we have a fight to preserve knowledge itself. n