Chasing the Vanishing Point

 Marcus Meredith

February 16, 2025



Chasing the Vanishing Point

Bringing Renaissance & Enlightenment Thought to Today 
OR 
The Search for Mastery

When I was young I caught site of a book on my Dad’s bookshelf in his office. It was The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci and opening it was a step into a fascinating mind- a mind often listed in “Top 10” lists of one variety or another as the No.1 mind ever in history. I kept coming back to the book, over and over, if for nothing else than to see the drawings that Leonardo did… and I was mesmerized. I didn’t appreciate until much later that I was blessed with parents who were great compliments to each other in life: Dad was a professor of Mathematics and Mom taught art and writing (she had a handwriting that was the equivalent of calligraphy as a matter of course and I’ve always wished I could write like she did  if only for the sheer beauty of what she could create with a pen). So, to me, arts and sciences were not that different, just different expressions of the creative desire to know the Universe. For this part of my childhood, I am eternally grateful.

Now we come to today, the here and now. In retirement I have lost the restrictions that the work-a-day life places on us all and am back to pursuing my love of knowing. But, is a “Renaissance Man” or an “Enlightenment Mind” possible in today’s age? Does the sheer weight of knowledge today make such an achievement unattainable?  OR, is this feeling something akin to a drive, a motivation of great force that only some find in their lives? My current mind-set drives me toward a definitive “YES” but in the end only time, choices, and circumstances will ultimately tell. Should that stop me or merely give me pause? I choose a small pause as I gather what I need physically and mentally to forge ahead. Will it be a fools errand… We’ll see. One resource I have obtained is a text by the author Robert Greene he titles simply Mastery. In the book, Greene attempts to give us a road map for how true “master” arises and the steps one must take to both to start on the road to mastery and the arrive at the ultimate destination. 

Greene posits that mastery comes in 3 phases. First, you must discover your life’s task of “Vocation.”  Without this, we walk through life aimlessly  and probably pretty miserably too. Once we know our vocation, we meed to begin an apprenticeship which means we need to find a (formal) master who we fit with well so that we can “absorb the master’s power” through the master-apprentice dynamic. All the while, we also have to develop a “social intelligence” that allows us to see people as they really are. Once we begin to achieve a certain level of knowledge, we begin to “awaken the dimensional mind” and start to activate our own creativity. Mastery, true master, comes when we begin to “fuse the intuitive with with the rational” parts of our minds Looking back at my teaching career, this was exactly what I did: found a master I could work with, absorbed all he could tell me that student teaching and schools of education were inept at instilling in a student teacher, then begin to see the process of education through my own eyes until, in my master’s words, became “ a lot better teacher than I am.” Amusingly, I just never saw things that way at the time or could truly express it thusly. 

My pressing question still remains: Can I do it a second time? Can I improve upon it and find more masters to learn from in more fields? Can you be only one thing at a time or can the multi-dimensional Renaissance Man exist today? Can lightning strike twice, as a writer so much later in life than most people who become writers? Being blindingly honest with myself, I am a competent writer but I know next to nothing about the business of writing. I know that I am an essayist and I like the essay format while fiction, thought I some stories in the mix and received positive feedback from disinterested parties, is mot my strength. Yet, despite that, I'd like to see at least a couple of the stories come to fruition. Or, if I pursue this course in life, am I just chasing the vanishing point with no chance of ever reaching it, dying in pursuit of the phantasmic destination. Looking at myself with clarity and constructive honesty, I am not a fantastic reader in that I can’t read quickly. I read for content and what I read is often memorized, so I have that advantage. I have so much I still want to  “teach” to people, so much to express that I can’t imagine another medium to express it with but writing. 

I have no doubt that there are and have been other people in similar circumstances but I have yet to meet one. Still, I have read and I continue to write and to watch people and events to hopefully impart some small dose of perspective and wisdom… and master this calling of mine. As Dumas put it in The Count of Monte Cristo, “ All of human wisdom is contained in these two words: Hoping and Waiting.”


* Mastery by Robert Greene, ISBN 9780143124177

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