Picture a library desk of the old kind. A slab of wood worn pale along the front edge where forearms rest. A book open on it, and a second book open beside the first. A few loose pages of notes in a hand that grows less careful as the evening goes on. Around it, other desks with other people bent over them, each keeping the same unspoken agreement about silence. This is not a particular desk that I can place in a particular building. It is the type, and anyone who studied before the internet has sat at some version of it. I want to use it the way one uses a diagram, to hold still something that is hard to see while it is moving.
A desk does not know whether the person sitting at it is making progress. It offers a surface and leaves every difficult judgement to the occupant. It has no opinion about how impressive the work looks, which is one of its more endearing qualities. What it does provide is an address. A question brought to a desk can be left there, open, for an evening or a week, with its evidence spread out where it can be seen.
Three kinds of work happen at such a desk, and they are easily confused. The first is locating: finding the book, the chapter, the page, the table. The second is remembering: carrying what was found away in one’s head. The third is understanding, which is harder to define, though I would put it this way: being able to do something with an idea that the page did not do for you. In my pre-medical years at Khalsa College in Amritsar, the first of these was expensive enough to pass for the whole job. When finding is costly, finding feels like learning. When memorising is laborious, memorising feels like understanding. Neither feeling is reliable, and the reason I keep returning to the image of the desk is that it is one of the few places where the difference between the three can be caught in the act.
This essay tries to catch it. It asks what each kind of work actually achieves, what happens when two sources on the same surface refuse to agree, and how a question can be left open without being abandoned. The last of these interests me most. Medicine, like most working lives, rewards the closing of questions, and I have come to think that an honestly open question needs as much discipline as a closed one.
The Round Room #
The most famous reading room in the history of the essay was a tower. In 1571, at thirty-eight and newly retired from public life, Michel de Montaigne fitted out the third storey of a tower on his estate in the Périgord as his library. A Latin inscription of that year, still visible, dedicates the place to his freedom, his tranquillity and his leisure. He describes the room in “Of Three Commerces,” and in Charles Cotton’s English, as revised in the nineteenth century by William Carew Hazlitt, the description has the exactness of a floor plan: “The figure of my study is round, and there is no more open wall than what is taken up by my table and my chair, so that the remaining parts of the circle present me a view of all my books at once, ranged upon five rows of shelves round about me.”
All my books at once. That is the dream of every desk: a surface on which nothing has to be put away for something else to be seen. Montaigne built it in the round, so that a turn of the head did the work of a trip to the shelves. There, he says, he turns over “now one book, and then another, on various subjects, without method or design.” And then comes a sentence that ought to unsettle anyone who romanticises sitting still: “my thoughts sleep if I sit still.” The table was there. He walked around it.
What is remarkable is that the man who built this room of perfect retrieval spent a good part of the Essays insisting that retrieval was not the point. In “Of Liars” he claims, with the mock pride that is half his charm, that no man living has a memory as treacherous as his, and he complains that his countrymen, hearing him say so, take him for a fool, “not discerning the difference betwixt memory and understanding.” In “Of Pedantry” he compares the bookish to birds that fly out for grain and carry it home in the beak without tasting it themselves; the pedant, likewise, picks knowledge out of books and holds it “at the tongue’s end, only to spit it out and distribute it abroad.” And in the essay on the education of children he writes the sentence that could be carved over any library door: “To know by rote, is no knowledge, and signifies no more but only to retain what one has intrusted to our memory.” What a man rightly knows, he goes on, he is “the free disposer of at his own full liberty, without any regard to the author from whence he had it, or fumbling over the leaves of his book.”
The free disposer. It is a better definition of understanding than mine. It means that knowledge has passed from the book into the person in a form that can be put to purposes the book did not anticipate. Montaigne is honest enough to turn the charge on himself. Do I not do the same thing, he asks in “Of Pedantry,” throughout almost this whole composition, culling from several books the sentences that please me, not to keep them, for I have no memory to keep them in, but to transplant them into this? The Essays, in other words, are themselves a desk: a place where sentences from elsewhere are laid side by side until something happens between them that happened in none of them alone.
The ceiling made the point a second time. Greek and Latin sentences were painted along the beams and joists of the library, many from scripture and the classical poets, several from the ancient sceptics. A reader looking up from a page would meet, over his head, another page: maxims chosen to doubt the very confidence that reading tends to produce. It is hard to imagine better furniture for a mind that wished to be well stocked without becoming merely full.
He overstated his case, of course. He could afford to; he had a library to walk around and no examinations to sit. A strong memory, he claims, is commonly coupled with an infirm judgement. Medicine would not survive on that principle, and I will come to why. But his distinctions, between finding a sentence, keeping it and freely disposing of it, are the distinctions the old library desk makes visible, and he drew them more than four centuries before anyone could summon a sentence from a screen.
The Reward of Finding #
The first temptation of the desk is that finding feels like progress. It is easy to see why. Finding takes effort, and effort leaves traces: the slip filled out at the counter, the walk to the stacks, the right page at last located and flattened under the palm. At the end of an evening a person can point to what was found. What was understood is much harder to point to, and the mind, which likes evidence of its own industry, tends to credit itself with the visible part.
Virginia Woolf caught this with more comedy than anyone. A Room of One’s Own grew out of two papers she read at Newnham and Girton in October 1928 and was published the following year. In its second chapter her narrator goes to the British Museum to find out why one sex has been so prosperous and the other so poor. She takes a slip of paper at the counter, opens the catalogue, and spends “five separate minutes of stupefaction, wonder and bewilderment” discovering how many books men have written about women. Then “an avalanche of books” slides down onto the desk in front of her, and the trouble begins. A student trained in research, she reflects, must have some method of shepherding his question past all distractions until it runs into its answer “as a sheep runs into its pen.” The young man beside her, copying assiduously from a scientific manual, is surely “extracting pure nuggets of the essential ore every ten minutes or so,” and his little grunts of satisfaction seem to confirm it. Her own question, meanwhile, flies off like a frightened flock, pursued by a whole pack of hounds.
The joke cuts both ways, which is why it has lasted. Woolf mocks her own lack of method, and she mocks the neighbour’s air of steady extraction, which she can perceive only as grunts and copying. Neither the desk nor the reading room can tell which of them is thinking. The copying student may be understanding a great deal. He may also be moving sentences from one page to another with no more comprehension than a carbon sheet. From across the room, locating and copying and understanding look exactly alike: a bent head and a moving hand.
Consider a hypothetical student, invented for the purpose, who wants to understand why the blood’s acidity changes with breathing. She spends an evening locating the relevant pages in three books, copies out the equations, marks the diagrams, and goes home with a satisfying sheaf. Every part of that evening was useful. She now knows where the answer lives, and she has its vocabulary in her hand. What she has not done is attempt the explanation without the sheaf, and so she does not yet know whether she can. The next morning someone asks her a question the books did not quite pose, what would happen to some other substance in the blood if a person breathed too fast, and she finds that the sheaf contains the materials for an answer but not the answer itself. The evening had been a success at locating. It had been mistaken, by the person who lived it, for a success at understanding, because the only evidence of work she could see was the evidence of finding.
When retrieval was expensive, as it was for students in most of the world before the internet, this confusion had particular force. A fact that had cost an afternoon felt as though it ought to be worth an afternoon. Possession was easily mistaken for mastery because possession had been so hard to achieve. Now that retrieval costs almost nothing, the effort of finding no longer flatters us in the same way, but its place has been taken by something subtler. We see the right answer on a screen, recognise it at once, and feel that recognising it was a kind of knowing. The ease of recognition has replaced the labour of the search as the thing that impersonates understanding.
What Recall Buys #
I do not want to slight memory, partly because Montaigne already did so with enough wit for both of us and partly because medicine depends on it. A clinician who had to look up the normal range for sodium, the branches of the facial nerve or the common side effects of a familiar drug every time they mattered could not think at the bedside at all. Thinking needs its materials at hand. A fact that must be fetched cannot take part in an argument while the argument is happening; it arrives too late, like a witness who reaches the court after the verdict. Retained vocabulary is what allows the mind to hold several things at once and notice how they bear on one another. Recall is the scaffolding without which understanding has nowhere to stand.
Scaffolding is not the building, however, and the gap between them has been measured. In 2002 the psychologists Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil, writing in Cognitive Science, described what they called the illusion of explanatory depth. People rated how well they understood the workings of everyday devices, a zipper, say, or a toilet, and were then asked to write out a step-by-step causal explanation of the mechanism. Having tried, they rated their understanding again, and the ratings fell. They had mistaken familiarity with the object, and with the names of its parts, for knowledge of how the parts produce the effect. A study by Ethan Meyers and colleagues in Judgment and Decision Making in 2023 found that the humbling spreads: having to explain one thing lowered people’s confidence about other, unrelated things as well, as though the act of explaining reminded them what knowing would actually require.
What I take from that work is a test, and a simple one. Recall answers the question what. Understanding answers the question what would happen if. A student who can recite a principle has stored it. A student who can use it to predict the outcome of a situation the textbook never described has made it his own, in Montaigne’s sense of free disposal. The desk is where that test can be set, because the desk is where one is alone with the material and nobody is asking questions except oneself.
The difficulty is that people rarely set the test on purpose. Recall is pleasant; it feels like competence. Explaining is uncomfortable, because it reveals gaps, and the gaps are exactly what the illusion conceals. The useful habit, at an old desk or a new screen, is to close the book and write the mechanism out in one’s own words, step by step, before believing one knows it. The page that results is usually shorter and more embarrassing than expected. It is also the first honest page of the evening.
Crossing from One Chapter to Another #
Chemistry offers a clean example of all three kinds of work, and I want to go through it slowly, because here the example is the argument.
Every student of the subject meets Le Chatelier’s principle, and most can recite it: when a system at equilibrium is disturbed, it shifts in the direction that tends to counteract the disturbance. That is a definition. It can be located through the index of any chemistry textbook in a minute and committed to memory in another.
Now carry it into a different chapter, in a different book, written by a different author for a different examination. In the blood, carbon dioxide and water stand in equilibrium with carbonic acid, which in turn gives up hydrogen ions and bicarbonate. Breathe faster and deeper than the body requires and you blow off carbon dioxide faster than the tissues produce it. The equilibrium shifts to replace what was lost; hydrogen ions are consumed in the process; the blood becomes more alkaline. That change alters the electrical charge on the proteins that carry calcium in the blood, so that they hold it more tightly. The total amount of calcium has not changed, but less of it is free, and the free, ionised fraction is the part that keeps the excitability of nerves in check. This is part of the reason a person who is over-breathing can feel tingling around the lips and in the fingertips, and sometimes a cramping of the hands.
A student who can recite the principle has located and remembered it. A student who can walk from the principle to the tingling fingertip has understood it, and the second student is not necessarily the one with the better memory. The walk requires noticing that two chapters, never written to meet, describe the same equilibrium from opposite ends: one in the abstract vocabulary of systems and disturbances, the other in the concrete vocabulary of lungs and blood. Nobody builds that bridge for you at a desk. Either you cross from one book to the other on your own, or you discover, usually late in the evening, that you cannot yet.
The psychologists Mary Gick and Keith Holyoak showed how hard such crossings are. In experiments reported in Cognitive Psychology in 1980, they gave people a story about a general who captures a fortress by dividing his army into small groups that converge on it from many roads at once, and then posed Karl Duncker’s old problem of how to destroy a tumour with rays that would injure healthy tissue at full strength. The solution is analogous: many weak rays converging on one point. People who were told to consider the story often found it. Without that hint, analogous solutions became markedly rarer. The knowledge was in their heads; they did not reach for it. Holding a principle is one achievement. Recognising when it applies, in a place that does not announce itself as its territory, is another, and it is most of what understanding means in practice.
Understanding also includes knowing where an explanation stops, and here the example needs a guard rail. The chain from over-breathing to tingling describes a mechanism. It does not describe a diagnosis. Rapid breathing has many causes, of which fear is only one; the lists clinicians keep include pain, fever and infection, low oxygen from disease of the lungs or a clot within them, certain poisonings, metabolic upsets in which the lungs are compensating for acid elsewhere in the body, and pregnancy. Tingling has many causes too, a good number of which have nothing to do with breathing. A student who has understood the chemistry and then concludes that every tingling, breathless person is anxious has stopped at the most elegant point and mistaken elegance for completeness. The fuller grasp includes the boundary: this mechanism explains this symptom when this is what is happening, and finding out whether it is happening is a different kind of work, done with a person and not with a book. In real life that work belongs to a clinician at the time, never to a reader at a desk.
When the Books Disagree #
The second thing a desk does well is to keep disagreement in view. The chemistry text lies open beside the physiology text; one set of notes contradicts another; a diagram drawn in the margin sits next to the paragraph it was trying to explain. A screen can show these things too, but it tends to offer them one at a time, each replacing the last. A desk lets them stay put and lets them quarrel.
Woolf’s chapter is, among other things, a study in what to do with a quarrel among sources. Her notebook fills with headings, and the authorities refuse to agree. Wise men, she observes, never think the same thing about women. She sets Pope’s line that most women have no character at all beside La Bruyère’s claim that women are extremes, better or worse than men, and calls it “a direct contradiction by keen observers who were contemporary.” She does not choose between them. Instead she finds that, in her listlessness, she has been drawing a face in the margin where she ought to have been writing a conclusion: an imaginary Professor von X at work on a monumental treatise about the mental, moral and physical inferiority of the female sex. The sketch tells her first that she herself was angry when she drew it. Then it tells her that the professors were angry too. Their books, she decides, “had been written in the red light of emotion and not in the white light of truth,” and “all that I had retrieved from that morning’s work had been the one fact of anger.”
The word she chooses is retrieved, and it is exact. The morning’s yield was not a fact about women but a fact about the conditions under which the facts had been produced, and about the reader’s own condition as she read them. The disagreement among her sources turned out to be evidence, though not of the kind she had come for. Later in the book Woolf states the general principle: on a contested subject one cannot hope to tell the truth; “One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.”
That is a large lesson drawn from a comic scene, and its smaller version is useful every day. Before deciding which of two disagreeing sources is right, a reader has to find out what the disagreement actually is. Often the words are the same and the meanings are not. One book says that over-breathing lowers the calcium; another, written more carefully, insists that the calcium level is unchanged. Both are right. The first means the ionised fraction; the second means the total. Laid side by side, the contradiction dissolves into a distinction, which is a better thing to own than either sentence alone. Sometimes the disagreement is about scope: one book describes a simplified model, the other the untidy system the model was simplifying. Sometimes it is about date, because one edition preceded the study that changed the other. Sometimes it is about units, or about which laboratory’s reference range an author happened to print. And sometimes, after every such check, the disagreement survives. That survival is information too. It says that the question is still alive in the field, and that whatever one decides will be a judgement and not a lookup.
Amritsar had its own great desk of this kind, and I find it fitting that it belonged to a poet. Bhai Vir Singh (ਭਾਈ ਵੀਰ ਸਿੰਘ), born in the city in 1872 and dying there in 1957, is remembered first for his poetry and for Sundari, published in 1898 and often described as the first Punjabi novel. He was also an editor of old texts, which is a scholar’s name for a person who must decide, line by line, what to do when sources disagree. His Puratan Janam Sakhi, published in Amritsar in 1926, conflated two older manuscripts of an early account of Guru Nanak’s life into a single readable text, and for a later edition he drew on a further manuscript then held by Khalsa College. His annotated edition of Santokh Singh’s vast Sri Gur Pratap Suraj Granth ran to fourteen volumes between 1927 and 1935, with notes wherever he judged a reader would need them. His commentary on the Guru Granth Sahib reached nearly half of the scripture before his death and was published afterwards, as it stood, in seven large volumes.
I cannot say how he worked, and nothing here depends on imagining his room. What his books make clear is the shape of the task. A conflated text is a gift to readers, who need one version they can follow. It is also a decision, and every such decision closes a seam; a later reader who wants to know which manuscript said what must go back behind the edition to the sources. Good editing serves both readers at once, offering a text to read and keeping the evidence for its choices within reach. That is the same double duty an honest student owes to his own notes. One page should say what he currently believes. Another should say where the belief came from, and where the sources parted.
The Shape of an Unanswered Question #
Which brings me to the question that does not close. Every desk eventually holds one: the problem the evening could not solve, the disagreement that survived every check. What should become of it?
Montaigne’s answer was cheerful and, read quickly, rather alarming. “I do not bite my nails about the difficulties I meet with in my reading,” he writes in “Of Books”; “after a charge or two, I give them over.” Persistence, he claims, only renders the obscure more obscure. Read more slowly, the passage describes a method rather than a surrender. He withdraws his sight from the difficulty, he says, and refers his discovery “to new attempts,” as one learns to judge the lustre of scarlet by passing the eye over it in quick, repeated glances instead of staring. The difficulty is set down so that it can be picked up again with fresher eyes.
The difference between a question set down for return and a question abandoned does not lie in intention. Everyone intends to come back. It lies in the record. An open question needs more than an empty space where an answer should be. It needs a description precise enough that another attempt can begin where the previous one stopped. Otherwise the question is not being preserved; it is being rediscovered, at full original cost, by someone who keeps arriving at the same point of confusion and mistaking the familiarity of the place for progress.
A useful page might hold four things. First, the observation or problem itself, stated as plainly as possible. Second, what the available sources appear to establish, with their names attached. Third, the exact point at which the explanation fails or the sources diverge. Fourth, what information would help decide between the possibilities that remain. None of this guarantees a solution. It makes the lack of one intelligible, turning a general fog of not-knowing into a map with a clearly marked edge.
This is a kind of progress that does not look impressive from across the room. The answer is still missing. Yet the question has become narrower, its sources explicit, its next step less arbitrary. The desk has done no thinking on the reader’s behalf; it has allowed the unfinished work to keep a shape, and returning to a shape is a different experience from returning to confusion. Woolf’s principle applies here in a humbler register. If one cannot yet tell the truth, one can at least show how one came to hold the opinion one holds, so that someone else, or oneself on a better evening, can check the route.
When the Question Cannot Wait #
Open questions have a vice of their own. Keeping questions open can become a refined form of procrastination. A person can maintain a beautifully annotated page of uncertainties for years and never act on any of them, admiring the precision of his doubt while others wait for a decision. The scholar’s patience is a luxury that many situations do not allow, and to praise the open question without qualification would be to praise a privilege.
The opposite failure is just as real. Demanding closure where none is available manufactures certainty. A form wants an entry, so a word is entered; a label, once written, is copied forward by everyone who reads it; and a provisional guess hardens into an apparent fact because nobody recorded that it was provisional. I have come to think this second failure is the commoner one in working life, precisely because it looks like efficiency.
The way between them is to separate two things that the word question tends to merge. Some questions need more evidence before they can be answered. Some decisions must be made before the evidence is complete. A study question belongs to the first kind; it can wait on the desk, with its four-part page, until the next attempt. A clinical decision often belongs to the second. A physician must act today on the information available today, and the honesty lies in how the action is framed: provisional, with a stated reason, a stated sign that would show it to be wrong, and a stated time to look again. That framing is the desk’s discipline carried into a room where there is no time to sit. The decision is made, the question behind it is kept open on purpose, and the duty to revisit it is written down rather than merely felt.
Some situations allow neither study nor provisional patience. A frightening symptom in a real person calls for prompt assessment by someone who can examine them, and no amount of reflective method substitutes for that. I say so plainly because essays about uncertainty can make it sound like a contemplative state. At its sharpest it is nothing of the kind. It is a reason to act now and to think again later.
Seamus Heaney’s “Digging,” the opening poem of Death of a Naturalist, his first full collection, published in 1966, is about the relation between a desk and the labour of the world. The speaker sits at a window with a pen in his hand, hears his father’s spade in the flowerbeds below, and remembers both his father lifting potatoes and his grandfather cutting turf on the bog. He has no spade to follow them with. The poem’s answer comes in its last line: “I’ll dig with it.” I read that line as a claim and as a promise. The claim is that work with a pen can be real work, going down into its material the way a spade goes into turf. The promise is that it must reach the ground. A question kept open at a desk earns its keep only if, sooner or later, it returns to the place where somebody needed an answer.
A Desk in Another Medium #
I do not want to end in nostalgia for furniture. The old desk had real costs. When finding material took hours, readers rationed it; some questions received the hours and others were simply dropped. Much of that rationing reflected nothing nobler than fatigue, closing time, or the fact that the only copy was already out. An inaccessible answer stays inaccessible, however admirable the effort to reach it, and students in many cities lost questions they would gladly have kept. Abundance has repaired a great deal of that, and I would not trade it back.
What I would like to keep from the desk is a set of habits that do not depend on wood. The first is juxtaposition: laying two sources side by side, on purpose, so that each can test the other, instead of letting each new page replace the last. Two windows on a screen can do this as well as two books on a table; the medium matters less than the decision to compare. The second is provenance, knowing where each claim came from, so that a disagreement can be traced to its root. The third is the explanation written in one’s own words before one believes one has understood. The fourth is the page that keeps an open question in shape: what is known, where it fails, what would decide.
These habits matter more now. A fluent answer can be produced in seconds, smooth and complete and often without a visible source. Fluency has a way of passing itself off as understanding to anyone who has not checked, and the checking has to be done against the grain of the screen. Montaigne’s round room presented all his books at once, and he still had to walk around it in order to think. The modern screen presents nearly every book at once, and the walking is still ours to do.
There is a sharper version of the worry, and it is worth stating. Gick and Holyoak’s subjects failed to cross from the fortress to the tumour unless someone supplied the hint. A well-built tool can now supply the hint every time, and often the crossing as well: ask it how breathing affects calcium and it will walk from the equilibrium to the fingertip without being prompted. If the bridge can be built on demand, one might ask, why should anyone learn to build it? My answer is partial and, I hope, honest. The bridge is the easiest part to hand over. What cannot be handed over so easily is the knowledge of where the bridge ends: the judgement that this mechanism applies to this case, and the awareness of the other causes that the elegant chain leaves out. A reader who has never built a bridge for himself is badly placed to notice when a fluent one has been built to the wrong bank. The habit of crossing on one’s own is less a way of getting answers than a way of becoming able to check them.
So it is worth looking at the imagined desk once more at the end of the evening, after the reader has gone. The lamp is off. The second book has been returned to its shelf, but the first has been left open, face down, at the page where the question stopped. Beside it lies a sheet of paper with four short paragraphs: the problem; what the sources say; the point where they part; what would decide it. Nothing on the desk says whether the reader understood. Nothing needs to. The question has been given an address and a next step, and in the morning someone will be able to begin exactly where it was left.
Evidence and Editorial Note #
Documented findings. The essay relies on the author’s public biography: pre-medical studies at Khalsa College, Amritsar. Montaigne’s library in the third storey of his tower, its round shape, five rows of shelves, and the passages quoted from “Of Three Commerces,” “Of Liars,” “Of Pedantry,” “Of the Education of Children” and “Of Books”: Essays of Michel de Montaigne, translated by Charles Cotton, edited by William Carew Hazlitt (Project Gutenberg edition). The 1571 dedicatory inscription and the Greek and Latin sayings on the library’s beams and joists, including several from sceptic authors: the Wikipedia article “Montaigne’s tower”. Woolf’s British Museum scenes, the catalogue, the neighbouring student, Pope and La Bruyère, Professor von X, the “red light of emotion” passage, the sentence on showing how one came to hold an opinion, and the origin of the book in papers read at Newnham and Girton in October 1928: A Room of One’s Own (Project Gutenberg Australia text). The illusion of explanatory depth: L. Rozenblit and F. Keil, “The misunderstood limits of folk science: an illusion of explanatory depth,” Cognitive Science 26(5), 2002, as described in E. A. Meyers et al., “Broad effects of shallow understanding,” Judgment and Decision Making 18, 2023. Analogical transfer and the role of a hint: M. L. Gick and K. J. Holyoak, “Analogical problem solving,” Cognitive Psychology 12(3), 1980, 306–355 (abstract record, University of Michigan Deep Blue). Le Chatelier’s principle and the carbon dioxide–bicarbonate equilibrium are standard chemistry and physiology. Reduced carbon dioxide increasing protein binding of calcium and lowering ionised calcium, with tetany and carpopedal spasm, and the wide differential of causes of respiratory alkalosis (anxiety, pain, sepsis, hypoxaemia including pulmonary embolism, salicylate toxicity, pregnancy, compensation for metabolic acidosis): Life in the Fast Lane Critical Care Compendium, “Respiratory Alkalosis DDx”. Bhai Vir Singh’s dates, Sundari (1898), the fourteen-volume annotated Suraj Granth (1927–35) and the posthumous seven-volume commentary: Wikipedia, “Vir Singh (writer),” and The Sikh Encyclopedia entry on Sri Gur Pratap Suraj Granth. The 1926 Puratan Janam Sakhi as a conflation of the Colebrooke and Hafizabad manuscripts, and the 1931 edition’s use of a manuscript held by Khalsa College: SikhiWiki, “Puratan Janam Sakhi”. Heaney’s “Digging,” its last line, and its father and grandfather digging potatoes and turf: Poetry Out Loud text of the poem; Death of a Naturalist (1966). Vendor representations. None.
Recollection and tradition. That the author studied at Khalsa College is part of his published biography. The library desk at the opening and the close is imagined and illustrative: a type, not a particular desk, library or room the author remembers. No specific study session, book, question, teacher or evening is asserted, and Bhai Vir Singh’s working room is not imagined or described. The student who spends an evening locating pages is explicitly hypothetical, and the over-breathing person in the chemistry example is a general physiological illustration, not a patient.
Analysis and forecast. The distinctions between locating, remembering and understanding, the readings of Montaigne, Woolf and Heaney, the four-part page for an open question, the distinction between study questions and provisional decisions, and the remarks on screens, fluency and software that can supply explanations on demand (described in general terms) are the author’s interpretation as of November 6, 2026. Independence. This essay is not sponsored by any institution, company, health system or technology developer. It is personal reflection, not medical advice; readers seeking care should contact their own physician’s office.
About the Author #
Kanwar Partap Singh Gill, MD, traces his family roots to Khadur Sahib in Punjab’s Majha region and grew up in Amritsar. He attended Spring Dale School and completed pre-medical studies at Khalsa College in 1994–1996. He earned his MBBS from Sri Guru Ram Das Institute of Medical Sciences and Research in Amritsar in 2002.
He completed PGY-1 at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock in 2007–2008, and PGY-2 and PGY-3 with UCSF Fresno at Community Regional Medical Center from 2008 through 2010. He has practiced medicine in California since 2010.
His career has crossed four distinct information eras: predominantly paper-based medicine, early and fragmented electronic records, the integrated-EHR era, and the emerging age of generative and agentic artificial intelligence.