Sunday 5 January 2003

Pic of the day: Screenshot from Civ2, the Mars Now scenario. But this is not about the game.

To follow knowledge

Well, as you can read in yesterday's diary, the night was pretty scary. Thank you all for your supportive thoughts and actions. It seems pretty much everyone agrees I should see a doctor. Even my best friend says so, and she is a doctor. Just not here, more's the pity. On the other hand, she thinks you don't die from fainting on the floor for a few minutes or hours. (At least I had no candles burning at the time. I've done without them today, wearing an extra T-shirt instead.)

I guess I could call my doctor from work tomorrow (if I'm still around, which it certainly feels like now). But what am I supposed to say? "I lost consciousness for 10-15 minutes at 3:30 AM"? Normally, people aren't conscious at all at that time! (In fact, I was on my way to bed myself when I started to feel bad.)

So, has this episode done its work and changed me into a better person? Sadly no. I already knew that I was mortal, I just don't like it. And I was already aware that there are some few but drastic downsides to living alone. But this is way out of my hands long long ago. My resolve remains, to do two things. One is to help people with pointless things they don't need, such as computer games. (Or the exchange rate between Norwegian and Icelandic coin. You know who you are. ^_^) The other is to make them think. As for myself, there is probably not much choice about it. Thinking is what I do, what I was born to do.

***

While I was still shaking with frost and fear tonight, I came upon this poem Ulysses by Lord Tennyson. I've seen it before, but it grows better with age.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

That's what I have done since childhood, is it not? Not as an explorer, like the aging Ulysses (Odyssevs) portrayed in this poem. Not even as a researcher, as such. Yet it was always my way of life, if not my life itself, to follow knowledge. At first just gathering it, then putting it together, piece by piece. First knowledge, then understanding, then insight. Perhaps, if I get to live long enough, wisdom. Yes, don't I wish. A philosopher, a lover of wisdom as the word originally meant, back when Odyssevs lived. "Beyond the utmost bound of human thought."

***

When I was a child, knowledge was so scarce that I would read old newspapers, or even a phone book at times. Now, knowledge covers our lands like water covers the bottom of the sea. Knowledge, knowledge everywhere ... and not a drop to drink. People feel confused, overwhelmed, insecure. As science plunges into secrets that you would believe were reserved for gods, more and more people turn their back.

Some believe in quasi-scientific theories that are made by people with another agenda, not to follow knowledge. It could be simply religion in disguise, like creationism or reincarnation. Not that I say the world was not created, or that the spirit in a human cannot come back. But the dumbed down ideas that are spread about, they are like the horoscopes of the weeklies. They have neither the power of science nor of myth: They speak neither to our brain nor to our heart. At best it tickles our curiosity, more often tells us what we wish to hear. It doesn't get better when you mix in alien spacecrafts. While these things may have some value as entertainment, it is sad to see people being led astray.

To me, the world of knowledge is not divided into separate rooms. All things are part of a whole. The simple natural laws of the atoms form the basis of all chemistry, including the processes in our body and even our brain. These are the same natural laws that guide the formation of stars and planets, so indeed we are connected to the stars. But there is no shortcut in which we can move the stars, or they us. We are one in origin and we are part of a greater whole, but not all parts are directly connected. Not all branches of a tree touch each other, even though they are all connected and all part of the whole. So it is with many things in nature. They are all part of the whole, but there isn't always a shortcut.

Oh, how beautiful is the world of knowledge. And how it saddens me that I shall lose it all, either suddenly or slowly bit by bit, and be as if I had never been. Yet the cosmos is manifest in four dimensions. What has ever been, always exists, somewhere along the axis of time. Time itself is secure from our tampering for now, though it may open up at some future point. Perhaps those who then are alive, shall be able to walk through the silent halls of time and see what was, long ago. Long ago, when we lived. For this is not for the race of men now living. It is far beyond the utmost bound of human thought.