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I don’t remember what the question was, but it was something about the history of Mardi Gras.
A few of my colleagues were chatting when they turned to me and said, “Eli will probably know.”
Now, Carnival lore is a topic that I know a lot about and love to talk about. I can drone on about wagon wheels and float designs and the undercurrent of racism for days.
Whatever the question was, I knew the answer. But I lied.
“I don’t know,” I replied. Even in the moment, I wasn’t sure why I didn’t unfurl the facts when asked. I always do. I do it a lot when I’m not asked.
And why wouldn’t I? If someone asks a question, I have access to all the answers I could ever want in a matter of seconds.
And until recently, I didn’t think that was a problem.
Let’s get one thing straight: Answers are easier to come by than ever. Information is not.
I was a high school sophomore when I got the assignment for my first big history paper. The topic was the Battle of Waterloo, and I sat alone at a broad wooden table in the Upper School library, staring into the polished grainy abyss.
I knew two things about this battle. One: Napoleon lost. Two: ABBA song. After a cursory search of Wikipedia, I now knew that French cavalry had broken against British infantry squares under the Duke of Wellington.
But the assignment was not to recap the battle. I was supposed to have an opinion on its effects. How it changed Europe in the 19th century.
And so I sat there, at that big table, flipping through giant green indexes of periodicals to find articles that had been written on the topic. One by one, I marked down promising leads and shuffled over to the bound volumes of magazines like Time and The New Yorker to read them. I browsed EBSCO and JSTOR, jotting notes as I went.
I stitched together a pretty decent understanding of how the battle affected 19th century Europe. I turned in the paper, probably got a C, and moved on with my life.
Over the next six years, I learned how to turn information into opinion. I eventually got a job as a research assistant with a professor of Southern history in college. My assignment was to find journals of individuals who met John Quincy Adams in Washington, D.C. during his presidential term.
I’d scour library shelves for early-19th-century travelogues and diaries and dutifully scribble down contemporary impressions of the sixth president onto notecards.
My professor would read the cards aloud in his South Carolina drawl that sounded like it was still fighting the Civil War. “Oh,” he once frowned, “I cannot quite read this one. The handwriting.”
“I am happy to type them,” I said, poring over the card. “The word is Potomac.”
It was tedious work. But my brother put it in perspective at the time: “Think about it: You could be the most knowledgeable person on Earth on what it was like to encounter John Quincy Adams in Washington DC between the years of 1825 and 1829.”
I found that prospect thrilling. (And yes, reader, I was single all four years of college.)
After graduation, I went to work at a history museum. It was now my job to find information—and to share it with the outside world.
I got very good at knowing things. Especially facts that bore no real importance.
For instance, I know that the floor of St. Louis Cathedral was designed by a free man of color. Just as I know that one madam in New Orleans’s red-light district went by “Bessie Budweiser.”
I spent so much of my life learning how to learn that I didn’t want to be the guy who didn’t know something. It seemed like an admission of weakness. I felt like I was bringing something of value if I could fetch a quick answer in a Reddit thread or a Google summary.
Even on questions I didn’t know the answer to, I’d offer conjecture: “I’m not sure, but I think the British really messed up the whole Israel Palestine situation” or “If I had to guess, a Big Mac does not have pickles.”
You may have been the victim of one of my many unsolicited answers.
When I sat down to write this story, I did my research to best understand why so many of us have a hard time saying “I don’t know.”
And there I was, doing the same annoying thing I came to write about. I was trying to find an answer to give you.
So I’m trying to quit, or at least wean myself off. I’ll go from chain-answering, to only answering after a couple of beers. This doesn’t mean I won’t pipe up about Mardi Gras krewe origins or obscure madam names.
I just don’t always need to be there with a response. None of us do. Because questions aren’t always invitations.
So, I’m going to give curiosity a little room to breathe and keep my answers preserved in little jars, ready to pop open when someone really wants my thoughts.
They get better with age anyway.