Ignorance

Among the many books in my library, there resides a text entitled The Encyclopedia of Ignorance. Promising “everything you ever wanted to know about the unknown”, this narrow volume celebrates the horizons of knowledge: the more we know, the more we discover we don't know. A book about science, it teaches a lesson about life.

Horizons have a wonderful power. Imagine being as the center of a sphere, the reach of experience (being in the world) as the radius of that sphere. The surface of the sphere: that is the horizon. All that encounters being is ready to hand, just within reach. What lies beyond, is not simply unknown, but the unknown unknown, a virtual space uncoupled with the being that is here.

The horizon, however, now that's something else entirely. At the surface of the sphere, all possibilities rest. The area in which the virtual and the actual meet, the horizon is where all that we hold as known discloses all that we may hold as unknown.

Take up new knowing, extend one's reach, extend the sphere, and watch as the horizon recedes: the area of ignorance stretches with the elasticity of a soap bubble, blown slowly... slowly... tenderly outward. With each addition to that equipment we call knowledge, the surface area of ignorance multiplies.

To expand one's horizons is to celebrate the growth of one's ignorance. Stretch out your limbs, reach to the furthest point around you. Just at the very edge of your fingertips... those oh so sensitive organs of touch. Do you feel it? That iridescent, insubstantial horizon?