So after three parts of my This I Believe series of posts, I am 125 pages in to the 259 pages worth of essays, so there should be about 3 or 4 more posts of excerpts from my reading. On an entirely semi-unrelated note, the word "excerpts" has joined "acknowledged" on the list of most challenging words to type. (Yes, this list is currently two words long.)
(Allison, Jay, and Dan Gediman. This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women. New York: This I Believe, 2006. Print.)
- "Einstein once wrote, "The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious."...What did Einstein mean by "the mysterious"?...I think that he meant a sense of awe, a sense that there are things larger than us, that we don't have all the answers at this moment. A sense that we can stand right at the boundary between known and unknown and gaze into that cavern and be exhilarated rather than frightened."
Besides the wonderful crafting of the words of these sentences, this paragraph struck me. Hard. I've always had a small (and by small, I mean enormous) fear of the unknown. That we will never know those things larger than us, and that we will never find all the answers. But recently (since college), I think that I've started to grow away from that fright, and gravitate ever so gradually towards exhilaration. Maybe that's not the best word for it, but it's what I'm going with right now. I've become more fascinated with questions of science, or the world around us, and questions that have no answer. Religion fits into that category, too. Leave it to the math major to try and figure out the answer to whatever he can, but I kind of like knowing that there isn't an answer. It means we can use any explanation we want and there will be some validity. It means we can gaze into that cavern instead of know it as invisible. And it means that "there is no answer" becomes the answer to those questions. See? There's always an answer. Sometimes it's just that there isn't one.
- "It's not that we find truth with a big 'T.' We investigate and sometimes we find things out and sometimes we don't. There's no way to know in advance. It's just that we have to proceed as though there are answers to questions. We must proceed as though, in principle, we can find things out - even if we can't. The alternative is unacceptable."
Well, if that's not a direct contrast to the above passage, then I don't know what is. Although I think that these two concepts are a little different from each other - we can still pursue an answer to a question, and ultimately conclude that there is no answer. "We can't know for sure" should be the end of an argument, not the beginning of one. If it's the beginning of an argument, then what's the point in backing that up? That sentence is all you need, and really have, which makes for a pretty boring discourse. However, if you were to search for this answer tirelessly with the belief that one exists, and then see futility in your efforts to discover the truth, well, that's okay with me.
Despite there being only two excerpts in this post, I did manage to read more than the approximately 30 pages I usually do for these posts. And I find it incredibly interesting and worthy of a point for hindsight symbolism (yes, I'm done capitalizing that) that the only two passages I posted were about not finding the answer, and absolutely finding the answer. Cool, non?
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