a wheel, if my stroke is too slow, then it bites deep but is not steady; if my stroke is too fast, then it is steady, but does not go deep. The right pace, neither slow nor fast, cannot get into the hand unless it comes from the heart. It is a thing that cannot be put into words.”
Technical, book knowledge, Oakeshott writes, consists of “formulated rules which are, or may be, deliberately learned.” Practical knowledge, on the other hand, cannot be taught or learned but only imparted and acquired. It exists only in practice. When we talk about practical knowledge, we tend to use bodily metaphors. We say that somebody has a touch for doing some activity—an ability to hit the right piano key with just enough force and pace. We say that somebody has a feel for the game, an intuition for how events are going to unfold, an awareness of when you should plow ahead with a problem and when you should put it aside before coming back to it. We say that somebody has taste, an aesthetic sense of what product or presentation is excellent, and which ones are slightly off.
When the expert is using her practical knowledge, she isn’t thinking more; she is thinking less. She has built up a repertoire of skills through habit and has thereby extended the number of tasks she can perform without conscious awareness. This sort of knowledge is built up through experience, and it is passed along through shared experience. It is passed along by a mentor who lets you come alongside and participate in a thousand situations. This kind of pedagogy is personal, friendly, shared, conversational—more caught than taught. A textbook can teach you the principles of biology, but a mentor shows you how to think like a biologist. This kind of habitual practice rewires who you are inside. “The great thing in all education,” William James wrote, “is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.”
These are the things good mentors do. But E. O. Wilson was fortunate to have an extra and extraordinary mentor, a man who took his craft and therefore his mentorship to another level.
After the University of Alabama, Wilson went to graduate school at Harvard, where he met Philip Darlington, who studied beetles and was a scholar of the geographic distribution of animals. Darlington gave Wilson practical advice on how to collect his samples: “Don’t stay on the trails when you collect insects,” he told him. “You should walk in a straight line through the forest. Try to go over any barrier you meet. It’s hard, but it’s the best way to collect.”
More fundamentally, Darlington showed Wilson what a true vocation looked like. As a young man, Darlington had climbed the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, collecting bugs along the way. In Haiti, he hacked through one thousand meters of virgin forest to reach the summit of that nation’s highest peak. When he was thirty-nine, Darlington floated himself on a log into a stagnant jungle pool in South America to collect a water sample that would help in his research. A giant crocodile emerged from the water, grabbed Darlington in its jaws, spun him over and over, and dragged him down to the bottom of the pool. Darlington kicked and fought and managed to swim free. He scrambled onto the bank of the pool, and the crocodile attacked again. Darlington was dragged back into the water and then broke free again. The crocodile’s teeth had pierced both his hands. The muscles and ligaments on both of his arms were shredded. The bones in his right arm were crushed. As he hauled himself back toward civilization, he became aware of how weak he had become from loss of blood.
Escaping death by crocodile is not proof of character, Wilson would later wryly observe. But what happened next was, and that is what left a mark in Wilson. Darlington was stuck in a cast for several months. So he devised a method to collect his samples with his functioning left hand, tying his specimen jars onto sticks that he jammed into the ground and then dropping the bugs in one-handed.
“The teacher, that professional amateur,” the critic Leslie Fiedler once wrote, “teaches not so much the subject as himself.” Through his behavior, Darlington taught Wilson that the naturalist’s life was not an easy life but an arduous one. He taught that the search for knowledge about our world is an important mission,