The irony of today's post is not lost on me. Much of what I call "navel gazing" is really comprised of me wondering about stuff, and hoping it's "relate-able" enough for those of you who take the time to read my seven-to-twelve paragraphs on whatever the current thing I'm wondering about might be.
I'm always wondering, and I always have. My father encouraged it; in fact, he was the one who introduced me to George Carlin and his observational wonderment -- some of it pretty misanthropic at times. My father wondered a lot himself, sometimes taking the time to write down his musings on three-by-five index cards, a practice I have inherited from him.
When I was in college, my colleagues and I would partake in certain activities meant to, shall we say, "spur wonderment." I used to wonder so much that at one point, over a pizza that was being devoured by myself and a couple other ravenous college friends, one of them lost his temper and, with his mouth full of cheese and tomato sauce, he let out, "Jesus, Dan, enough! Do you ever wonder who wonders?"
Well that shut me up. For the time being, anyway.
And these days, I do wonder who wonders. In this age of Google and Wikipedia, and Ask Jeeves and the rest, one really needn't wonder any more. The answers are all out there, just a few clicks away. My nine year old regularly asks me to "google" the answers to questions he has for me, the once omniscient father.
My brother and I still laugh about how my father used to stammer through explanations of the things we didn't understand. He was an unusually intelligent person, and nine out of ten times he knew the actual answers to the questions we had for him. But on that tenth occurrence, we always knew when he was stumped. He'd say things like, "Well, now you know, that's an interesting question," or "There are a lot of conflicting theories about that."
We'd let him struggle for a while, before one of us inevitably said, "In other words....." And the other would respond, "You don't know."
After a few years of this, the "you don't know" wasn't necessary any more. Dad would either laugh and admit that he really didn't know the answer, or he'd defiantly say, "No, no, I actually know this!" It didn't matter much; our admiration for him didn't flag. He wasn't all-knowing, but that was okay. He still knew a hell of a lot more than either of us did.
I wonder . . . if all the answers are out there on the Internet somewhere, is the quest for knowledge over? Is the wise man on the mountaintop out of a job?
More importantly, I wonder this: If there's nothing left to wonder about, do we continue to be human? Or have we morphed into something else? And is that something else something more, or something less?
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