The view from nowhere

"I do find it odd that people mind not knowing about God...I see that there is a very strong human instinct to want to know everything that we already don't know. This seems odd when we live with unknown things all the time; after all, we don't even know whether what we remember about our own lives is what really happened"

---Diana Athill.

With time you don't grow any wiser. With time. Though you'd like to think it wasn't so. To think of what "is" or "isn't" doesn't alter a thing. The pile of books unread grows each year, like a Talib's accumulation of ignorance. 'What can you know?' a poor substitute for who can you know? It ain't what you know, it's who you know, Bulleh.

But say you had read all those books. Then what? A few more conversations, or blog posts perhaps? A few more tangled thoughts, tumbling down. A book is borrowed, on borrowed time. Leaf through the old ones to see what's been marked: ' or + or * for something really important or profound that you simply forget when you return to your backgammon. A conceit, of course, and yet human. The great, simplifying, purifying process revealed by a few signs!

You would like to read for pleasure, just for once. No, that's not it, because you do read for pleasure, with no thought of the 'morrow. Is there another form, a higher type of pleasure that isn't so fleeting, that builds into the pattern of a life, a life lived well?Well?

Who can you cite to help you see yourself now? Not I, but another. We grow into darkness in the sense that more becomes unknown each day. The one thing needful. Memory? Not for self-identity, for Christ's sake. But for Christ's sake.For when we remember our own lives, full of lives, we learn to see, and see again, the view we have from here, this very place, this transient but beautiful bridge over the deepest of waters.