Benjamin Franklin: Student

In the current issue of The New Yorker, Jill Lepore writes copiously about Benjamin Franklin, mostly focusing on the contradictions in the great man's life. It seems that nineteenth-century Americans took Franklin and tried to make a sort of Solomon out of him, holding up the proverbs and maxims that he placed into the mouth of his fictitious Poor Richard Saunders as an absolute guide for life. "Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise"--that's one of the Poor Richard proverbs that Franklin dropped on us. And who among us, when wanting to sleep just a little bit longer, hasn't hated Franklin for those words.
While I commend the entire article to you, I'd like to make two quite separate points from these words.
First, Lepore points out the general complexity of the life of the mind. Whenever you think you have things all figured out--as apparently those nineteenth-century moralists thought they had Franklin all figured out--you're almost certainly oversimplifying. Life is complex. Any discipline worth studying is complex. When you can discourse on a significant topic, beginning with a phrase like, "It's really quite simple," then I'd suggest that you go back for another look. Life, like Benjamin Franklin's legacy, is rarely quite simple.
Second, and contrary to the thrust of Lepore's article, things don't have to be quite simple to be essentially true. Sure, Benjamin Franklin might have failed to live up to many of his own proverbs, but that does not put the lie to the proverbs or even to Franklin's belief in them. As I write these words, I should be going over to the gym to run a couple of miles. I should do it, but I'm not going to do it. Does that mean that I'm really a hypocrite and a liar when I speak of the importance of physical fitness? Not hardly. It means that I'm a human, frail and imperfect. I'll run on Wednesday.
Do these two points contradict each other? They do and they don't. (How's that for a contradiction about contradiction?) They only contradict each other as much as life always contradicts itself. A successful student will learn that life is not only not as simple as they'd like it to be but that life is not as complex as it might seem to be. The tendency to oversimplification makes us dull and pointless. The tendency to overcomplication leads us to surrender and despair. If you're to accomplish anything academically, you'll need to navigate a course between these two shoals. Easier said than done, but it can be both said and done.