The Beauty of Eclectic Interests

It must have been around my twelfth year when I discovered the idea of the Renaissance man. From the Britannica: “…an ideal that developed in Renaissance Italy from the notion expressed by one of its most-accomplished representatives, Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72), that “a man can do all things if he will.” The ideal embodied the basic tenets of Renaissance humanism, which considered man the centre of the universe, limitless in his capacities for development, and led to the notion that men should try to embrace all knowledge and develop their own capacities as fully as possible.”

“Wow,” my already overloaded 12-year-old brain thought. “There’s something to aspire to in the future!” Think of the name plate on the door! The second line could just say RENAISSANCE MAN. My resume could be just one line. Say, look at that rock! Hey, a green dragonfly! I wonder if there’s any milk left for a bowl of cereal? Why do I have to do homework on a Saturday? Is Edmond Dantes going to escape and get revenge? Wow, these girls are pretty interesting! It has gotten steadily worse since then.

The leap from pursuing a career as a renaissance man to building a life filled with eclectic interests was a short one. Without realizing it, I was already well along the road. Oh, yeah, I could settle for eclectic interests. After all, it just means drawing ideas, style, and taste from a wide variety of sources. I’m in! Since that time, I’ve happily accumulated more and more hats, so many, in fact, that I sometimes forget about hats way down in the pile I haven’t worn for a while.

Parents and older siblings spurred these and many other interests.

Even in elementary school, there developed a fascination with nature. The Western Publishing Company and Golden Press put out a series of Golden Nature Guides and Golden Science Guides, later shortened to just Golden Guides. The first one I had was probably Insects, driven by my older brothers’ Boy Scout merit badge efforts. Mammals came next, then probably Trees. I devoured these. 

The illustrations in Trees, by Dorothea and Sy Barlowe, became lifelong favorites that still warm my heart when I see them today. Then followed Butterflies and Moths, Birds, Reptiles and Amphibians, Seashores, Astronomy, Rocks and Minerals, and Non-Flowering Plants. The little volume on Weather became my school of meteorology. I must have gone through that one a hundred times. 

I used it as a textbook when I taught meteorology. The guides became a pastime. I went through one or more of them almost daily, reading and gazing at the illustrations hour after hour. I was hooked. The folks began to buy them for me for birthdays and for Christmas. Soon I needed my own bookcase. . . at age ten! At its peak, my collection of Golden Guides numbered more than a dozen and a half. 

That’s a dozen and a half interests right there. I still have and use many of them. I’ve been collecting books ever since.

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Natural interests and the Golden Guides were the beginning of real education for me. I could study at my own pace when I chose to, which was often. They served as references, as when we had a very strange insect appear in the back yard the summer of 1962. It was one of the bugs I had never seen outside of illustrations in books, the ichneumon fly. One summer they came to bore into and lay eggs in the old American elm stump behind our house. Yikes! Maybe I need a helmet. Is that a wasp or a bee? Get the Golden Guide.

From Golden Guides I went on to acquire many more interests. My dad was always very curious and observant. I’m pretty sure he passed the interest in having many interests along to me. We lived on a lateral moraine left by the Wisconsin glaciation. The sandy ground beneath my feet and the Golden Guide to Geology stoked a lifelong interest in glacial geology and glacial features. Before she was seven, my daughter joined in the fun, pointing out the pretend engraved letters on the sides of irregular glacial boulders that read, “Made in Canada.” I loved it.

From the Trees volume I developed an interest in local species, lumber, and forestry. From Insects and Weeds I began to learn my way around gardens and farms. I can spot poison ivy from quite a distance. From Reptiles and Amphibians I learned to distinguish venomous from nonvenomous snakes. From Spiders and Their Kin I was able to fear some spiders much less and others much more. Non-Flowering Plants taught me the deadly mushrooms. The benefits and joys were endless.

Of course, many interests have been added over the years. There is geology, geography, architecture, history, literature, writing, current events, popular culture, oral history, biology, music, art, crosswords, horticulture, and many more. There are half a dozen more I’ve been meaning to investigate. I must make a list of those.

There are many benefits to having eclectic interests.

I’m never bored anywhere I go. We can see, notice, and enjoy more of the world around us. We can develop a growing appreciation of the world and of life around us. It builds confidence. I find it invigorating. So much to learn! I can carry on a basic conversation with more people. Interests spur greater energy. Multiple interests keep our minds active and our vision keen. We can become more interesting to others. We are open to new ideas from many sources, or we should be. We want to collect books. When we find The Right One, we can share our love with more intensity and enjoyment, relishing the wonder of it all.

On the other hand, there are not a few drawbacks to having eclectic interests, too.

For example, we may suffer from a lack of focus on more immediate things because we’re distracted by so many features of our surroundings. Others may find our eclectic interests exhausting. We may be more argumentative or confrontational, so we should guard against that.

People may find us curiously intense, or even obnoxiously intense, but hey, that’s their problem. We may develop contempt for people who are not interested in everything. Why are there so many dull people, anyway? We’re always behind in our reading. We have collected lots of books. Some people say we have too many books, but what does that even mean?

As we age, it may help to develop other interests and hobbies. I’m on it! I have a section of a bookcase that holds incomplete collections of books. More bookcases! More workbenches! More instructional videos! More travel! Woohoooo!

As Polonius told his son Laertes,

This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

In other words, follow your own carefully selected interests. Other people don’t have to be impressed with your interests and don’t have to join you. It’s not necessary for others to embrace what you find worthy of your attention. We don’t have to embrace their interests, either, thank God!

Perhaps being an introvert makes eclectic interests more attractive. Now I’m going to go into the other room for a while, curl up in front of the fire with the Golden Guide to Trees, and think about what is interesting in the world. I’ll be back in time to make supper. We’ll have a conversation, just the two of us.

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