aphantasia | Bertram's Blog

Acquiring Knowledge

August 25, 2026 — Pat Bertram

The acquisition of any knowledge is always of use to the intellect, because it can thus drive out useless things and retain the good, for nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known. — Leonardo Da Vinci

I certainly need to acquire more knowledge to drive out the useless things I’ve learned about how so many people are trying to destroy this country — not just the globalists and other international groups, but groups of citizens and non-citizens, politicians and judges, fraudsters and lawbreakers within our own country. Useless knowledge indeed since there’s nothing I can do so long as the elections in Colorado are pre-determined as they have been for the past couple of decades.

I’m not sure how to acquire more knowledge except by reading, and for the most part, I’ve read all the non-fiction I intend to, at least for now, anyway. I do have a small collection of alchemy books I inherited that I started to read, but they aren’t so much a history of alchemy as self-teaching books. The exercises all start the same: visualize something (that something varies from book to book). In one book, they explained how to change things: visualize your immediate surroundings down to the merest detail, change what you need, then merge the visualized world with the real world, and voila! Or presto! Or ta-da! Or whatever your preferred word is, and the world has changed.

The problem is, I can’t visualize anything. I am mentally blind. (The word for that is aphantasia.) So much for my becoming an alchemist.

There are, of course, real world ways to acquire more knowledge, mostly just by living. Recently I’ve learned that one needs a certain ruthlessness to be a gardener. For example, my petunias were getting long and leggy and producing few flowers, so I trimmed the plants way back and now they are blooming again. And I wacked the branches off an overgrown bush, so now I have an unattractive stump with lots of arms sticking out, but I can see green where new sprouts are coming up, so in another year, that bush will be small and attractive and evergreen.

Another real-life bit of knowledge I acquired (or rather reacquired) is that no matter how careful you are, there will always be some weird accident that brings you low. In my case, I had just pulled a cup of tea out of the microwave and carefully set it on the counter, but my fingers must have been entangled in the string of the tea bag because as I pulled my hand away, the bag sloshed out of the cup and onto the back of my hand. 200 degrees of heat is painful!!

I did what I always did with burns — slather it with natural vitamin E from a capsule, and when I still felt that excruciating burn, I iced it. That took away the heat enough that I felt fine. Whew! The weird thing is that it actually charred the skin. Turned it brown. Luckily, it’s healing well, even the bits that blistered, and I haven’t had any pain since those first few minutes. Even now that the charred skin is flaking off, there’s no problem. (And yes, I do know that brewing tea in a microwave is not the way it’s supposed to be brewed, but it’s a lot easier to brew one cup that way than with a kettle.)

Frankly, I can do without that sort of learning. Perhaps I ought to dig out my alchemy books again and try to see what I will never be able to see. That has to be easier than to damage oneself, however accidentally, in the name of knowledge.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in Adventure, books, history/myth, How to, life. Tags: mentally blind, changing the world, aphantasia, a love of learning, learning alchemy, acquiring knowledge, dealing with a burn. 2 Comments »

Skimming

March 7, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I have the terrible habit of ingesting books whole without actually reading the words. I’ve never been able to explain how I read — it’s not skimming exactly, but if I read every single word individually as if reading aloud, the meaning of what I’m reading gets lost in the words themselves. Maybe the way I read is a form of meditation. Or daydreaming without visuals. (I have aphantasia — the inability to form images in my mind.) Despite having said that, I do occasionally skim, especially scenes of violence or sections that don’t keep my interest, and considering that I have read more than 25,000 books of all genres, unless the writing is better than merely competent, most books have huge sections that don’t keep my attention. Also, when it comes to fiction, there are few plots or characters that don’t echo in my head — some because I’ve read those very books before; some because they are similar to those books.

Which is why it surprises me that the Wheel of Time saga has caught my imagination enough to allow for rereads. Though there are chunks of the middle books that I can’t bring myself to read again, or even just to skim, I find myself trying to slow down and savor the rest of Jordan’s words. (Even subtracting out the last three unreadable books written by the substitute author as well as the chunky parts of Jordan’s books, there are still approximately three million words that I do read. And if half of those are used for prosaic storytelling, there are still one and a half million of Jordan’s words to savor.) A lot of his writing is truly beautiful. The subtleties are beguiling. And there is much to puzzle out as I deconstruct Robert Jordan’s world and his writing.

Sometimes I miss little things if I get to skimming a section I remember well, until something draws me back. For example, in a passage I read today, a character noticed the hero’s guards/ guardians/ personal army outside the hero’s room quietly playing a finger game: knife, paper, stone. A little later, three of those people entered the hero’s room to deal with his latest infraction of their “honor.” As they left him, one said they’d won the right to punish him and warned him not to dishonor them again. Written out like this, it’s obvious that their game (their version of rock, scissors, paper) was to choose those three, but when these elements are separated by several pages, the association becomes so obscured I missed it in previous rereads.

Admittedly, the situation wasn’t important to the overall story, but it tickles me to find such correlations. Because of this, I’m training myself not to skim, but that will work against me in the long run — without skimming, most books are not worth my time to read.

When I was young, I often read as a way of expanding my mental horizons — a way to work out in advance how I would deal with the circumstances the characters are faced with — but that’s no longer an issue with me since most fictional situations are now either somewhere in my past or will never be in my future. A choice between love and a career? No longer applicable. What to do with an unexpected pregnancy? Definitely not applicable! Taking revenge on someone? Not something I would ever do. Save the world from the forces of evil? Only applicable if that evil appears in my own backyard and even then it’s not something I want to contemplate. (I’m wary enough of thoughts to think that thinking itself can bring down upon my head whatever it is I am thinking of.)

Without any necessity for reading myself into the story, most novels become ho-hum, especially if the writer can’t make me care for the characters. Without skimming at least a part of the book and skipping other sections completely, I’d probably never have read most of the books that I did. Not finding other books of interest to me could be why I’m caught in the spokes of the Wheel of Time.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, and since you’re probably skimming this essay anyway, I doubt it matters.