Not Knowing

I am astounded by what I do not know. What I do not know would fill the Mariana Trench. Cataloguing what I do not know would be “heaping infinite upon infinite and multiplying infinite by infinite.” The Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards used those words to express his inexpressible sense of wickedness. I do not think not knowing is a sin, but it does seem that everything I come to know carries with it the anguished knowing of what I have yet to know. What I do not know is a wound, perpetually open, refusing suture. What I know is such a small flame, so negligibly luminescent, that I doubt it would attract even the most flame-intoxicated moth.

There is a cruel irony, maybe even a tragedy, in knowing what we do not know. We are finite beings, frail creatures. We are aware that our time and energy are bounded. Responsibilities annex our days, our weeks, our months and years. Our minds flag, grow dim with fatigue. Even if the human life span were capable of being extended, brain capacity, despite 100 billion neurons, each tangled by tendrils to other neurons, is finally, limited. And even if some transhumanist dream of neural implants or cognitive nanobots to boost brain capacity came to pass, the what we would want to know would outpace our capacity to know. We will always get no farther than the foyer of what we want to know, no matter how enhanced we might be, how posthuman we might become. “Much study is a weariness of the flesh,” we are admonished in Ecclesiates 12:12, and “the making of books hath no end.”

Of course, I do know some things, know them broadly and deeply. I am an academic, a professor at a university. I profess my expertise in and my best thinking about literature and language. I specialized in Puritan literature, so a thorough knowledge of the Bible was a must. I read through the Geneva Bible, which the Puritans read, a dozen or two chapters a day, as did the Puritans. It was an invaluable, if flesh-wearying, experience, to be sure, but it prompted a desire to know more. I wanted to know how the Geneva Bible compare to other versions—the King James Version, the Revised Standard Version, the New International Version, the New American Standard Version, even the Thomas Jefferson version, “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth,” in which anything not directly pertaining to the ethical principles Jesus advocated was sedulously razored out. I wanted to know how the books in the Bible became canonical--how were they chosen, when and by whom and according to what criteria. I wanted to know if they were inerrant. I wanted to know who their actual authors were and when, exactly, they wrote. I wanted to know how historically accurate they were. I wanted to know how the history of Biblical interpretation from the German “high criticism” to the present. I wanted to know about the sacred texts of other cultures, the Qur’an, the Torah, the Veda, the Analects. I wanted to know why the Bible contained so many discrepancies and contradictions. I wanted to know—and I knew I never would because I never could.

This is how it goes with me, this unfurling, this exfoliation, of wanting to know. Everything I come to know, every concept, every perspective, every way of being and doing in the world, every way of understanding it, catalyzes a wanting to know its history, its progress, its mutations, its key players. Everything I read points me to something else I want to read. But I also know that my wanting to know arcs far beyond my ability to know. It surpasses what my finitude permits. So I sample articles, read the occasional book—brief migrations to regions of knowing that I know I can never fully inhabit.

And I want to know more than academic things. Once, I was sitting with my brother-in-law, a welder by trade, at his kitchen table, grading literature exams. He was drawing plans for a trailer to hitch to the back of his Ford Explorer. He suddenly said, “You know, I really envy how much you know about literature. It’s really important.” “John,” I said, “here we are, sitting at a table you made, in a house that you built, and I’m watching you draw up a blueprint for a trailer you will create from lumber and iron. And what am I doing? Writing comments and assigning grades. Who’s really doing something here? I envy you.” “Well, there are different kinds of knowing and different kinds of doing,” John replied. And he was right, except that I wanted to know how to do what he could do. I wanted to know his knowing. My dad could carpenter, fix any appliance, and play the stock market; my mom could coax tomatoes and cantaloupes drunk on their own juiciness from even the most inhospitably soil; my brother, a sports therapist, develops his own photographs. I want to know how to do all these things. They are practical, they leave a tangible imprint on the world. Even Thoreau, that arch-Transcendentalist, knew beans. I don’t know beans about beans, or much of anything else that would pass the cheek-swab test of practical knowledge.

Socrates says “True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.” There’s some consolation in that, though to speak candidly, while it sounds good, I do not know what it means exactly, and I would like to. Who knows: perhaps I should celebrate the yawning expanse of my ignorance, give it a snappy salute and the fanfare of trumpets. Maybe it’s a good thing that I’ll never find that granite substrate upon which to build a structure of self-satisfied knowing. It can be healthy to be humbled, to be pulled away from the self-reflecting pool that so much of our culture places us beside. The world is complex. We are complex. Things dwarf us. Perhaps awe and reverential wonder provide a fair exchange for not knowing. Who knows? I don’t. But I want to.