I'm seriously getting sick of knowing things. In fact, I fear that I'm starting to resent
knowledge altogether. I feel like I'm kidding myself every time I open a
textbook.
It seems like the more I study, the more I know, the more magic is taken out of everything that I have yet to discover.
I don't know where these facts will get me, really, besides a few knowledgeable comments in a conversation years away that will make me feel somehow superior. I'll tilt my head back a bit, squint my eyes, and talk for a minute about why cheetahs are a declining species, or how many concubines a certain Chinese emperor kept. Everyone will nod politely, and move on to something else, caring more about the way my fingers drummed on the table than what I've actually said.
I wonder what it would be like to forget everything that I have learned. To let go of what I hold so tightly, open my mind completely, and free myself from every opinion but my own. Education cannot help but mould us. It opens our minds, but closes them at the same time. Sometimes I find it hard to sort through my thoughts, to figure out which are really my owm and which have come from a man who's been dead for two hundred years. To wade through the knowing that doesn't mean so much and get to the kind of knowing that comes from experience.
The desire to get a firm grip on these facts starts to fade when I realize that they will never give me a firm grip on myself. This will take a different kind of knowing. And we're kidding ourselves if we think that a university degree will somehow make us a better person. Perhaps the process of acquiring this degree will give us something more, but the knowledge itself, to me, is hollow.
I like feeling things, I like experiencing things, but knowing, well, knowing doesn't mean so much.