Dan Mooney

Haven’t the time or the clarity of thought to flesh this out right now into the worthwhile essay it could be — but before I forget, want to mention re: the Internet: Socrates was waaaay ahead of his time when in his genius he declared that he knew nothing. I for one am not yet wise enough to know I know nothing. But I’m getting there – mathematically, zero is the limit toward which my knowledge is moving.

I find that in this, the Information Age, purported to be helpful inasmuch as the accessibility of known/heretofore unknown information has skyrocketed, I am at once regularly delighted and enlightened by new pieces of information, yet-

I know how little I know.

I do remember being told as much long ago by an old college friend, in our freshman year, as we motored around Newton Center in his red Chrysler Sebring convertible, top down (this car was for me Lester Burnham’s cousin Tony’s brand-new firebird…) on a day just like today, actually, when the breeze and the sun embrace you.

I took it then as a compliment, truly. How perceptive, how profound was I! But I look back to that moment then and feel comforted, and distressed. Both, because now I understand that the INFORMATION age can also foster KNOWLEDGE, which can be synthesized into WISDOM, with which one may see those truths of life, one of which is that there is never enough time for everyone to do everything. Most of all me, I can’t do everything. Can’t know everything, will probably miss some things, just hope they’re not the most important ones.

Faced with all this Information, I feel small. The world’s not getting smaller, I am. But what I can see is myself, and my mind, and – physically – my brain, in a different way. It’s not a bucket to fill with drops of data (by that token, it’d be a sieve). Perchance it works the other way, not holding any information itself, but really just containing the shortcuts to that information, stored somewhere else, let’s say in an air-conditioned server room known as the Universe. G*d as IT guy.

If all that information could trickle back upstream to its source, the end user, the individual; if our mental resources are infinite, what then becomes of our individualism? Maybe that’s the truth of it all, that we “know” nothing, yet can or perhaps will have access to everything. In that case, there’d be no ego, and truly nothing to know in that there will be no mind with which to know it.

In this way, we’re shrinking. Terrified and free. And we’re all in this alone. Together.

Few grammar rules fit into the category that encompasses both “ones I know and use” and “ones I notice others not using.”

‘Ere I start, let me ask: Why don’t I spread this out and not fit it all into one post? Nice. I was thinking of serializing the material on this blog, but that was met with reluctance on my part (I didn’t feel like it) because I know there’s something to the construction/combination/synthesizing of two discrete pieces of information into a new, third idea. Like poems in a chapbook, I like how each poem can be independent of all others, yet fit within a larger mosaic to play its part on another scale entirely. How a note can resound a certain tone, and also be a part of a chord. And for that matter, a variety of chords, major and minor in key.

One grammar rule that burned more deeply into my brain was the one about splitting infinitives. “To drive” is an infinitive. “To not drive” is worse than a rake on a chalkboard to my ears. Notice the root for “infinity” in that word “infinitive.” There’s an entirety between that “to” and that “drive.” And no one’ll put that asunder.

Except everyone. Even me, and that’s the shameful part. I do my best to avoid splitting that infinitive, but occasionally, for the sake of laziness or just not to sound like a tightly wound perfectionist (if it walks like a duck) I’ll embed that not, perhaps even to thumb my nose at intellectualism just like the lion’s share of the American populace.

Gotta pick my battles. Listen up: “To boldly go…” Star Trek. I guess in the distant future, after meeting up with those extra-terrestrials, the rule will have been permanently abandoned. And why not? When you’ve got a whole universe to explore, all these new experiences to process, the rigors of language seem not so exciting, or significant, maybe rightfully so.

In our time, besides being petty, maybe that rule is archaic to the point of impracticality, like so much else from the past. That’s the delicacy of languages, of meaning, truly of epistemology itself — they shift, they live, they breathe. But I’m going to stick to my guns on this one, lingual evolution be damned – we may unshackle our hearts and maybe our minds, but this rule and dozens like it are what brought us here to this level of understanding. If everything is relative, meaning is differential, this = not that, and nothing exists except in our minds, I say we’d better keep them sharp. We’ve got to understand each other.

Clear as mud. Is that all Greek to you or what?