danajohnhill.org | Hard Times Come Again No More

I will likely never be a rich man.  But if I were to have sufficient means, I would do this:

Find the world’s experts in every field pertaining to the humanities, from history to art to religion and so on.  I would seek those whose expertise was married to a powerful communicative skill, who could really convey their knowledge in a way that a layman like me could understand.  These would naturally be educated people in considerable demand at institutions of learning, and/or authors of books, without much free time.  So, I would need ample resources to hire them to be my tutors on a series of worldwide learning expeditions.  For instance, I would hire a geologist, a botanist and a zoologist to take me on a tour of the great national parks of the world.  I’d hire some professor from Oxford or Cambridge to take me on a tour of every historically significant place in England.  I’d go to China with a team of experts who could teach me about the people, the places and the heritage of that country.  And so on.  I’d have places I’d want to go, of course, but I’d rely on these experts to tell me the things I ought to see, because–and this is true of all of us–I don’t know what I don’t know.

I thought of this just a few minutes ago as I was watching a new PBS series called The Story of India, hosted by Michael Wood, whom I remember from another excellent series, In Search of Shakespeare.  He doesn’t present himself as an expert.  Rather, he’s merely an intellectually curious man who gathers information about the world around him, and regurgitates it in a way that lazy slobs like me can understand.  In The Story of India he travels the country, focusing on some important topic (Buddhism in the episode I just saw), and visits sites important to the subject, talks to people who know about it (the Dalai Lama, for instance!) and relays this learning to us in a way that makes sense and is entertaining.  It’s edutainment.

So, wouldn’t you love to tour Luxor or Giza with an Egyptologist?  Or walk the halls of the great art museums with an art historian and a curator.  Music is my forte (rim shot), but I’d still find it immensely rewarding to attend an orchestra season in New York with a musicologist from Julliard.

There’s a lot a man can learn from books.  But staring agog at the Colosseum with a guide book in your hand cannot compare to having an archaeologist, an architect and an historian take you on a little walk.

That’s what I’d do with my money.  That and a solid gold house.

Filed under: Musings, Television, Travel on January 6th, 2009