I Want to Know!

Leonard Chang and I share a passion. A passion for crime and detective fiction. The difference between us is that he carried his passion beyond just reading this great body of literature and wrote his own noir trilogy. His mysteries aren't great and some of the loose ends get tied up rather too neatly, but his detective is compelling and sympathetic. His reluctant sleuth is a Korean-American named Allen Choice who excavates his own heart while getting to the truth behind the mysteries he's pulled into solving. Incidentally, one of the best tidbits in Chang's first novel is how Allen got the last name Choice (it's based on a true story). In his essay "Why I Love Crime Fiction", Chang traces how his love of philosophy led him to write crime fiction:

You remember more of your childhood reading, connect them to your interest in philosophy, and conclude that both are premised on the impulse to figure out the world, to analyze in a methodical way the elements that have created chaos and disorder. The analyst, whether a private investigator or a rationalist philosopher, seeks within his or her own moral and personal code to discover and articulate what has gone wrong, to right these perceived wrongs, to find a view of the world that is worth living in, to reorder and contain the chaos. What is a private detective but a philosopher in a trench coat?

Chang articulates for me why I love the genre but he also hits on why I want to study philosophy and have since started pursuing a graduate degree in Philosophy of Religion and Ethics. In both crime fiction and philosophy, there is an acknowledgement that truth can be known even if known imperfectly. As he says in his essay, there is an attempt to bring order out of chaos to understand reality as it really is not how we wish it were. I have this desire to know. Studying philosophy or theology or science or literature are refined ways of feeding the urge to know.

As a child I had less refined urges to know (and truth be told I still do) that explain why I had to read my sister's journals or steam open her love letters. My intent wasn't malicious, I just wanted to know what she was thinking or what boyfriends say to girlfriends and I wanted to know if steaming open letters really worked. It explains why I opened both my and my sister's Christmas presents and then taped them back up again. It explains why I snooped through houses I was babysitting in. I would look through cupboards and drawers in almost every room in the house. I wanted to know how people lived through what they owned and what they tried to hide. I would fake being sick just so I would have our house to myself to poke around undisturbed in everyone's closets to find out what they were hiding.

The urge to know explains why even today I want to know the backstory on the quirky characters I meet. Like Judy, the Asian grocery store check-out clerk with buckteeth and a sweet smile. Does she work the weekend night shifts because she doesn't have a boyfriend and doesn't want to be home alone? Does she live with her parents and do they give her grief for working at a grocery store instead of something more glamourous? Is she the life of the party with her friends or still as shy as she seems to be at Albertsons? What are her dreams and aspirations? What makes her laugh until she can't breath? I WANT TO KNOW.

The down side to this urge is dilettantism. I found it very difficult to pick one area of study in college and then later to figure out what I wanted to pursue as a career since almost any field and almost any kind of job was interesting (at least for a little bit) to me. I think the ideal outlet for a dilettante or for one who wants to know how the world works and how all the different areas of study are interconnected is writing. A writer can explore and research any topic for a period of time, create a finished product, and then move on to the next subject. The research /exploration phase can include reading, interviewing, and traveling all things I love to do. All in all sounds like the perfect career to me! Why am I not pursuing it? Oh yeah, I'm a dilettante and therefore have other interests that bring satisfaction as well when pursued. Perhaps one day all my interests will coalesce. And that's when I know I'm dead.