Jack of One Trade, Master of None Else
Years ago I came across a passage in The Making of a Philosopher, Colin McGinn’s memoir of his life in ideas, that has stuck with me ever since. McGinn was looking back on a life spent almost entirely inside one discipline, and he admitted something that felt almost like a confession coming from a man who’d given his whole career to philosophy: that pouring everything into one pursuit, to the exclusion of everything else, doesn’t actually add up to a full life. You can master a field. You can become the person people call when a certain kind of question comes up. And in the same stroke, you can quietly starve the rest of yourself—all the other curiosities and capacities that might have made you a fuller person, not just a sharper specialist.
Fearful in Gaza by Abdalhadi Alijla is a haunting, intimate memoir.
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