An Interlude On Dolly Parton and the Choice to Get Better

In the days after Dolly Parton’s death, I found myself reading about her life. I knew the music, of course, but I became curious about the person behind it. The songwriter, businesswoman, philanthropist, and rather remarkable human being who somehow managed to create an enormous public persona without allowing it to obscure the person underneath.

Somewhere in that reading, almost by accident, I came across something she had said years earlier:

“If you can read, even if you can’t afford education, you can go on and learn about anything you want to know. There’s a book on everything.”

I had not been looking for anything about lifelong learning. But the quote hit me. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to connect several things that have mattered to me for most of my life: curiosity, education, teaching, certainty, writing, and the obligation to keep learning long after someone has handed you a diploma. This interlude grew out of that accidental encounter.

It is a classic Dolly Parton way of putting something, plainspoken, generous, and deeper than it first appears. She made the remark in a 2018 interview about literacy and her Imagination Library. Her point was not merely that reading is useful. Literacy gives a person a kind of independence. Formal education may end. Money may be limited. Opportunity may be uneven. But if you can read, stay curious, and are willing to make the effort, you can educate yourself for the rest of your life.

Parton did considerably more than say it. Her father, whom she regarded as exceptionally intelligent, never had the opportunity to learn to read and write. Partly because of that experience, she founded the Imagination Library in 1995, initially to provide books to young children in her home county in Tennessee. What began locally ultimately became an international literacy effort that has distributed more than 300 million books across five countries.

There is something wonderfully coherent about that: learn, make learning possible, and pass it along.

I spent much of my professional life in education, and for years I told students, residents, and fellows essentially the same thing, although in somewhat less elegant words:

You have two choices each day: get by, or get better.

I meant it literally. It is possible in almost any profession to become good enough. You acquire the knowledge and skills, accumulate experience, and eventually reach a point where you can perform competently without stretching yourself very much. Medicine certainly allows that. So does law. So does business. So, I suspect, does nearly everything else.

But there is another way to approach a career, and eventually a life. You can keep asking questions, keep reading, and keep discovering that something you thought you understood is more complicated than you realized.

You can keep getting better.

Learning After the Diploma

We tend to think of education as something with a beginning and an end. You go to school. You earn a degree, perhaps several. At some point someone hands you a diploma and pronounces you educated. But a diploma really means something much narrower. It says that you completed a particular course of study at a particular point in your life. It says very little about what happens next.

One of the great privileges of literacy is that the classroom can disappear while the education continues. That is what I hear in Dolly Parton’s observation. Increasingly, I have also come to realize that it explains why I write.

Most of the essays I have written began because I was curious about a particular subject. I wondered whether the filibuster really protected democracy or merely obstructed it. I wanted to know whether the Supreme Court actually behaves as politically as Americans increasingly assume. I have tried to understand what government can reasonably accomplish and where its ambitions outrun its abilities. Healthcare, presidential power, Iran, climate policy—the subjects have been different, but the process has been remarkably similar.

I begin with a question. I read. I researched. I tested what I thought I knew. And almost invariably, the subject becomes more complicated and nuanced.

The Trouble With Certainty

The reward of deeper understanding is not always greater certainty. Often it is a more accurate appreciation of complexity.

I no longer think that is a weakness. Quite the opposite. We live in an environment that rewards certainty. Complicated policy questions become binary choices. Institutions are good or corrupt. People are heroes or villains. Political arguments are compressed into slogans. Once we have chosen a position, disagreement can begin to feel like evidence of ignorance, stupidity, or bad faith.

I am susceptible to this too. I think most of us are. We become attached to our conclusions. We notice evidence that supports them and become remarkably inventive at explaining away evidence that does not support our view. Education and intelligence offer surprisingly little protection. Smart people may simply become more skilled at defending what they already believe.

Writing has become one way I try to minimize that tendency in myself. Research forces me to slow down, define what I am actually claiming, encounter evidence I might prefer not to encounter, and distinguish what I know from what I merely assumed.

Sometimes it changes my mind. My essay on the filibuster is a good example. I began inclined to defend it as an imperfect but useful protection for political minorities. The more I studied its history and operation, the less persuaded I became by my own position.

That was not a defeat. That was the point.

Getting better sometimes means learning more. Sometimes it produces greater confidence. Sometimes it means discovering that you were wrong. And sometimes the most important improvement is simply recognizing that the answer is more complicated than you wanted it to be.

Being Willing to Look

Not long ago I had a friendly but spirited discussion with a golfing friend who happens to be a lawyer. We were talking about the Supreme Court, and he was quite certain that judges and justices were fundamentally partisan actors.

I disagreed. Rather than continue arguing, I asked him to read an essay I had written on the subject and tell me where I was wrong. I had spent considerable time looking at decisions, voting coalitions, appointments, confirmation history, and especially the distinction between having a judicial philosophy and behaving as a partisan operative.

He more or less declined.

It irritated me more than I expected. But after thinking about it, I realized that what bothered me wasn’t that he disagreed. It was the unwillingness to test the conclusion. And then came the more uncomfortable recognition: I have done versions of exactly the same thing.

We all have areas we are invested in. Professional expertise may actually make this harder. The lawyer has spent a lifetime around the legal system, the physician around medicine, the economist around markets. Expertise gives us knowledge, but it also gives us habits, identities, loyalties, and intellectual commitments.

The danger is not conviction. I do not think lifelong learning requires us to wander through life uncertain about everything. The danger is allowing conviction to eliminate curiosity.

Perhaps one of the real tests of lifelong learning is whether we are still willing to read the thing that might prove us wrong.

Curiously, the more I have researched difficult subjects, the less inclined I have become to lash out about them. Not because I believe less. In some areas I believe things more strongly than I once did. But I have become more comfortable recognizing that apparently conflicting propositions can both contain truth.

Government can solve important problems and create new ones. A Supreme Court justice can have a recognizable philosophy without acting as an agent of a political party. A policy can be well-intentioned and still produce damaging consequences. An institution can be deeply flawed without being illegitimate.

Sometimes the evidence points strongly in one direction. Sometimes it does not. Knowing the difference has given me something I value more than reflexive certainty: earned confidence with intellectual humility

Why I Share It

Another part of this is something I have probably understood intuitively for a long time without putting it into words.

People have often told me I can take complicated material and make it understandable. I do not know exactly why that comes naturally to me, but I have come to feel a certain responsibility to use it. If I can spend the time sorting through a difficult subject, separating what matters from what does not, understanding the competing arguments, and finding a way to explain it without stripping away its complexity, then perhaps I should. Knowledge seems somehow diminished if it simply stops with the person who acquired it.

That is not the same as making complicated things simple. Some things are genuinely complicated, and reducing them beyond a certain point does not clarify them. It strips away essential truth.

The goal is something different:

Make complicated things understandable without making them simplistic.

That may also explain why I sometimes become a little too enthusiastic about sharing what I have learned. Once I have spent days or weeks wrestling with a subject and suddenly see it differently, my instinct is to say, You have to see this too.

I am still getting better at that part. The discovery may be exciting to me because I have already taken the journey. The reader has not. Sharing well requires more than enthusiasm. It requires meeting the reader where they are and building an entrance.

That matters to me increasingly because some of my essays are demanding. They are often long, heavily researched, and filled with distinctions that resist easy summary. I occasionally struggle when someone asks me to explain an essay (or book for that matter) in a few sentences. The difficulty is not simply that there are too many facts. Often the nuance is part of the conclusion. The journey is part of the answer.

Still, Dolly’s observation cuts both ways. If knowledge matters because people can gain access to it, those of us who write have some obligation to make that access easier. That may mean a concise summary before a long essay, an audio version for someone who would rather listen while walking or driving, clearer signposts through an argument, or simply better writing.

Accessibility should not require removing the intellectual work. Dolly did not say there was a three-minute summary of everything.

She said there was a book on everything.

There is an implicit bargain in that. The writer should make the path as clear as possible. The reader has to be willing to walk it.

Why I Keep Writing

This is probably a more personal essay than most of what I write. Usually I invite readers into a subject I have been trying to understand. This time I am inviting them a little further in, to the habits, doubts, and aspirations that explain why I write in the first place.

Looking back, I realize that these essays have become part of my continuing education. I write because I want to understand something better. I research because my first impression is rarely sufficient. I wrestle with the evidence that does not fit comfortably with what I expected to find. And then I share what I learned because understanding seems somehow diminished if it ends with the person who acquired it.

None of this means I have escaped bias, obstinacy, or the temptation toward certainty. Quite the opposite. Writing is one way I try to keep those tendencies in check.

Perhaps that is why Dolly Parton’s few sentences resonated with me so strongly. Reading gives us access to an almost limitless education. Curiosity makes us use it. Humility allows what we learn to change us. And sharing gives whatever we have learned a chance to become useful to someone else.

I am not sure there is anything more complicated behind it than that. It is simply how I have tried to live: learn something, understand it as well as I can, and, when possible, pass it along.

There is always another book. Another question. Another assumption worth testing. Another opportunity to understand something a little better than I did yesterday.

The diploma may have been awarded long ago. The education need not end.

Every morning still presents roughly the same choice:

Get by, or get better.