Is the devil in the details?

Posted: Jun 7, 2024

I'm struggling to get started with "The Confessions". The Introduction alone quickly turned into what I call "word soup", and this is troubling because the introduction was written by a more modern writer.

I am very much a "big picture" kind of person. Over the years, this has served me well because I tend to see the goal, and the basic steps of getting to the goal. Being able to break problems down into steps is essential as a computer programmer. The downside, however, is I often don't see the small things like misspelled variable names or missing punctuation. That all works out in the end though, because my IDE or my unit tests catch the niggling details and allow me to correct them.

But, in my reading, my "big picture" mentality has turned me into a skimmer looking for the next plot point. I am not a visual reader. I do not "see" characters or settings in my mind's eye. If I even have a mind's eye, it must be quite visually impaired.

Sometimes, my way of reading things can create misunderstandings. Last year, for example, I shared this article with some online teacher friends. My "big picture" take on it was that people should get out and explore the world through observation and experimentation and share their findings because scientists gain knowledge from all sorts of places, and that you never know, but some random blog post about an observation you made may spark an idea in somebody and lead to new discoveries.

To my surprise, the conversation immediately turned negative. People got stuck on the idea of "real laboratory science" and the ethics of studying humans, and how the author understated stuff like reading other studies and the scientific method, and similar things. While I had read a big idea "Observe and share because ideas encourage other ideas", others didn't seem to see what I saw.

In a similar vein, about 15 years ago, I was working on writing a "form editor". The editor allowed users to create a template for a record that would generate a form that users could fill out and save the data to the database. I was showing my boss how I could add a field called "x" (I've long forgotten what "x" actually was), and have that field show up on the screen and how the data was saved. Because I was testing locally, I would open up any old form and add a field to test it. When I showed my boss, I happened to have the "Patient" form open when I added "x". Rather than seeing the concept of adding any field I desired to a form, my boss got stuck on the "x". "You would never have x on a patient form," he griped. And, he just couldn't get past that little detail and see the bigger picture.

At this point, you are wondering what the hell my point is. So, here we go.

While reading the introduction of "The Confessions", I saw

“His famous words in the first chapter of Book I, fecisti nos ad te, come into their own.”

And, of course, I was curious, so I hit kagi and did a quick search that led me to this

Fecisti nos ad te, et inquietum est cor nostrum donec resquiescat in Te

is the full sentence, which translates to

Because you have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in Thee.

I find the fact that somebody was able to write an entire article on that one sentence ^[1] to be incredible. That one sentence is in a prayer in chapter one. When I hit stuff like prayers or long descriptions while reading, I absolutely gloss over it, looking for the next plot point. Plot points don't have to be actions or life events, they can definitely be thoughts or emotional reactions. But, "Because you have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in Thee?" To me, this advances absolutely nothing in the story.

In "The Confessions", this is a prayer to aid in the writing of the autobiography. In the way I read and think, this is just an opening formality to be safely ignored while looking for the real story. So, finding this one little sentence that I barely noticed to be something that people believe worthy of parsing and dissecting and examining in great detail has stopped me in my tracks.

I like the way my brain works. And, it often feels like other people are slow to catch up to where I am. But, I know I am a very shallow pool, and I am trying to become a deeper one. I am a middle aged woman. Is it too late to even try to learn to see the stuff that I have always considered minutia?