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Makes me feel good inside TBH. When I was in high school and college I can remember two of my professors calling my name out at the beginning of class and asking me to stay behind after class was over because they wanted to know where I learned to write. One of them said I wrote graduate level academic literature, full of citations, extensive vocabulary use, etc. Shocked me both times it happened. I did just enough in English classes to get by because I wasn’t very invested and engaged with the work. But I always had talent as a successful imitator, and knew how things were ‘supposed to look’, all the way down to the finest details. They always thought I had these amazing gifts, and maybe they were right. I always looked at it as being a successful bullshit artist that can produce real work when it came to boring assignments.
I was always one of those guys though who was his own best and worst critic. It’s like someone who’s been typing away at a keyboard all his life. He can type faster than most people he knows, but if you ask him to spell out the first row of keys, he couldn’t do it. If someone asked me to explain the grammatical structure and rules of the English language in detail, I couldn’t do it. I just know how it’s supposed to ‘feel’. You can get very far doing things that way but it isn’t genuine understanding. It’s pseudo-logical.
I always envied my father for this reason. He was one of those people who could just look at something and immediately understand it. And he read like an absolute maniac. When I was extremely young he’d have me look through his telescope outside at the planets and he’d explain how the big red spot on Jupiter worked. I used to ask him all sorts of questions. I remember he explained the chemistry of Titan’s atmosphere to me and how if you could stand and survive on the surface (you couldn’t), you’d be able to “taste,” the climate on the tip of your tongue, and he’d describe how it’d feel. I once saw a car crash through the front door of a pharmacy and spoke to my father about it and how it sounded and he explained “Mm. It sounded like punching through a cardboard box full of crushed glass.” We used to talk science fiction notions and uploading consciousness and being able to transport me into his frame of reference. Would you feel the same internal process of sensations? And he once came up with the analogy of Beethoven’s deafness in his late 20’s; and how even when composing his music although he couldn’t hear it, he knew and understood what he was composing and understood how it felt by abstraction. My father was like God to me. He knew everything on any topic you could put to him, down to the individual details; whether it was the Napoleonic Wars, marine biology, the history of the cosmetics industry, it literally didn’t matter. I always looked up to him like he was omniscient but I was also afraid of him. He was an intimidating and eerie person to be around.
When it came to translating abstractions into concrete notions, it requires genuine intellectual understanding. I never had that to the extent he did. I really miss the long walks I got to go on with him.
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