An ironic post about Thoreau's "Life without Principle"

"I am astonished to observe how willing men are to lumber their minds with such rubbish,-- to permit idle rumors and incidents of the most insignificant kind to intrude on ground which should be sacred to thought." 

~ Henry David Thoreau, Life without Principle

I'm blogging about this...see the irony?

Now normally I am not a huge Thoreau fan--(I mean, really? Who really cares about the temperature of Walden Pond in the dead of winter? It's not like we're gonna be swimming in that any time soon...)--so I will immediately turn the topic of conversation to my default topic of conversation, Sherlock Holmes. 



In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet, Watson recounts his first adventure with Holmes, in which he discovers Holmes is a private detective and also the eccentric genius that is common knowledge to even people who haven't read the books. Watson is astonished to find out that Holmes has no knowledge of--and little interest in--things that are beyond the scope of his profession. Therefore he doesn't care if the Earth revolves around the Sun. 


Doctor Who vs. Sherlock, deviantArt masterpiece by Pomegranate-Pen

In fact, Holmes says it would be detrimental to his deductive work if he allowed irrelevant information to "clutter" his mind. Of course Holmes seems to have put the theory of not "lumbering his mind" into extreme practice, but the principle is the same as Thoreau's quotation. I think this brings up some interesting questions:

Can you really overload your mind with useless information? Is there really such a thing as "useless information," or is it a oxymoron, considering even random trivia can prove useful in impressing people when you compete against them while watching "Jeopardy!"?

But consider the last phrase of the Thoreau quotation. It's not so much that information lumbers our minds--the human brain is more efficient at storing information than a computer, and unlike computers no brain has melted down from too much data. The problem is that all this trivia interferes with "sacred thought." We're too busy surfin' the net, watching reality TV and reading (perish the thought!) gossip magazines that we forget to think for ourselves.