The Man Who Knew Too Much

It was a well-known Alfred Hitchcock movie from 1956 starring Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day. (Did you know that it was a remake of an earlier 1934 movie of the same name ... by the same director? Starred Peter Lorre and Leslie Banks.) (By the way, Peter Lorre did not play the Jimmy Stewart character; Leslie Banks did. Yes, in this case "Leslie" is a man.) Stewart plays a doctor on vacation with his family in Morocco where he is suddenly given information on an assassination plot -- information that is incomplete, unclear, and unhelpful -- and in order to keep him quiet, the assassins kidnap his son (his daughter in the 1934 version). The movie is about their mad race to retrieve their son before the assassination can be carried out. Now, perhaps these assassins were right about needing to keep the good doctor quiet, but I'm not at all sure. While the premise is "the man who knew too much", it turns out that Stewart knew too little and had a hard time making heads or tails out of the "tip". (He was, for instance, told to seek "Ambrose Chapel". In London he looked the guy up -- turned out to be a taxidermist -- and had no idea what he was talking about.) He didn't know who would be killed, who to warn, who to protect, when it was going to happen, who was doing it. He didn't know a whole lot. He knew, in fact, too little.

I, on the other hand, am a man who knows too much. There are times when I feel like the kid in the Far Side cartoon who asks his teacher, "Mr. Osborne, may I be excused? My brain is full." It feels as if, in order to learn a new name, I need to forget an old one. There's just so much stuff up there that it becomes quite difficult to wade through it to find the rare, useful items like "Where did I leave my keys?" while easily being to locate "helpful" info like ... Jimmy Stewart starred in Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much.

There is so much I know I don't need or want to know. I have a larger-than-average vocabulary, which is fine, but I also know most of the double meanings of seemingly half my vocabulary. This is stuff I don't need to know. I know most of the clinical terms for body parts, so why would I need so to retain so many of the slang terms for sexual deviations that have no use and no bearing on my life? I can easily recall movie trivia and pointless facts, but have a hard time remembering things that could be valuable like birthdays of loved ones. Mostly, though, it is a lot of information packed into this pea brain and it is information I don't need, never needed, and don't want. I know too much.

In my work I deal a lot with computers. In computers it is possible to wipe memory. You can format a hard drive and everything it once remembered is forgotten. You can overwrite and sometimes simply turn off memory and whatever was there before is gone. Worst case, you can always add more memory or hard drive and, without losing anything, your computer has a greater capacity to remember. Not me. There is no "mind wipe". I can't unsee the things I've seen. I can't go through the files in my brain and delete ... permanently. I know too much.

Sadly, there is also so much I don't know. There is history and economics, science and mathematics, and, very much, theology. I'd like to know my Bible better, know how to read ancient Greek and Hebrew, have a better understanding of their cultures and times. There is so much more out there I don't know than what I do know. I'd love to be able to wipe out all that stuff I know that I surely don't need with its attendant ramifications and consequences. Sometimes it feels like I know too much, but more often not enough. Often it feels like I have just enough information to be dangerous or useless ... kind of like the good doctor from the movie. Hmm, maybe he did know too much.