It’s simple to start writing about ignorance. You find something you do not know, and there you begin.
A library can reduce me to tears. I stand silent in front of it—people shuffle by with their arms overfull with books, or with a single slender volume held gently in two hands that they course over while walking. There are eight stories of books, and millions of stories on each story. I stand there shaken, heartbroken, faced with more knowledge than I could possibly ever access. Even more unsettling, I sense that nothing I could possibly ever create would add to it. My childhood was rife with metaphors about the relationship between the soul and God as the relationship between a drop of water and the ocean. The contribution of a drop of water to the ocean is utterly imperceptible. So it is with any book I may write. So it is with my very life. If you see someone weeping in front of a library, offer her a tissue, and maybe a reassuring touch. There is little more you can do to comfort one who is stricken by her smallness in the face of what she does not know, and of what she cannot do.
You are familiar with the phrase, “This is what we now know about matter”, or time, or salamanders, or the Ottoman Empire, or Virginia Woolf, or cancer, or cognition, or brains. But what, realistically, do “we” know? Faced with a question I do not have the answer to, I will often say, “I’m sure that it’s known, but I don’t know it.” What is background knowledge? What is the knowledge that we are collectively supposed to be building on to greater and greater heights? Is knowledge a great library, the grand sum of all that has ever been thought or known by every sentient being from the beginning of time? Are those who are more knowledgeable those who have accessed more from this library?
Anyone could have written this poem, done this experiment, made this observation, connected those dots, solved this algorithm, read those books, planted those seeds, invented that recipe, made that relationship, fought that battle, followed that path. Anyone could have, but only particular people actually did. There is maybe nothing new under the sun then except for us.
mydigest said,
March 2, 2007 at 9:54 pm
The people who have the Knowledge are generally taken to be the world of Academia. This is split up into specialties. Although it is spread out world-wide, and supposedly not vulnerable to the fate of Alexandria, the destruction comes from within, not without. For example, two of the specialities are polluted with fake science at this time: Environmental Science, and Astro-Physics. When journalists seek an expert in either of these, they might as well have summoned a witch doctor. We have no way of knowing whether this fate will befall other, or all, specialities, given the superstition and conspiracy-theorising deliberately selected for sensational effect by the people in the news and documentary media who are routinely neither educated nor intelligent themselves. Cy Quick at mydigest.wordpress.com