Decidedly Older (not necessarily wiser)
A Life Lived Unexamined Is Not One Worth Having Experienced …and other such thoughts….
If wisdom comes with age, then clearly the inference is that Wisdom comes in measurable degrees and is quantifiable – just as aging is. Age, after all, is but just one unit of Time. But just how is wisdom or knowledge measured?
The question that comes to mind, along with the notion that Men have lost sight of the need for or utility of technology as they’ve become immersed in the minutae of science and its purpose.
That is, it’s useful to be able to reference to Time as a measurable unit, in a general sense. But knowing the scientific underpinnings of Man’s notion of Time – borders on the cusp of ludicrous when it relates to day-to-day activities and events. If one’s attempting to locate a distant speck of cosmic dust quad-trillions of light-years away such knowledge is useful or necessary.
But closer to home, finding or hitting a target with any degree of accuracy depends on whether one is using a BB gun or a ballistic missile. Do you need or use a BB gun to bring down an elephant and a shotgun to kill a flea? All answers can become subjective.
But if logic suggests alternatives to achieve greater efficiencies or results why is it so often necessary to point out the ‘obvious’ through the use of structured logical reasoning? Does this suggest that the Obvious is not necessarily so; thus making it a logical paradox?
That is, you cannot learn that which you already know. So, if something is known or obvious it must be so for a particular reason that’s available to general and/or common knowledge. If it does not then the implication is that specialised knowledge is required to make the knowledge obviousness. Thus, that which is generally unknown remains, generally, unknown – not necessarily unknowable.
All human means of communication posit that there exist a reason for the activity or exercise. That is, it serves a purpose. However, there appear to exist no definitive answer as to what that purpose Is. Or, it can be asserted that many purposes can be attributed to any communication, since answers become dependent upon context: subjective or objective. Historical records are never objective – history’s written by the victors? – since the recounting take on a hue of subjectivity by the account’s recorder POV. There’s fact, fiction, politics and propaganda to contend with in any retelling of past events, which is why eyewitnesses often offer differing views to the same event.
Being of modest means, tastes and aspirations, autobiographical accounts that detail every (almost all) aspect of one’s life seems to be somewhat like vain-glory, conceit, self-importance, self-aggrandisement.
That is, apart from one’s particular POV on any aspect of that life, the question of importance or relevance in the Grand Scheme of live beggars the question: what makes you more particularly special than anyone else … in the microcosm that’s life?
As I said, modest. biographies, auto or otherwise, amount to self portraits that places the focus on the integrity of the observer or recorder of past events.
31/01/2022 19:07:15 -0500