I know the halting pursuit

The other day, motoring along in our

quiet neighbourhood, I was listening

to National Public Radio in one of

those bright and sparkling mid-day

interview programmes they should be

commended for conducting. An Indian

fellow was being engaged, on how the

web frees people from having to know

things, allowing them to cultivate

the nobler facets of their networks.

He was quite exuberant on the pros-

pect of supplanting cultivation as

it used to be understood, with an

admittedly enviable suppleness of

cordial ignorance. I'm sorry, I did

not make notes of the event; but I

cannot believe I raise an unfamiliar

paradigm, to anyone brilliant enough

to log on.

I do not complain of obsolescence 

in one's style of having lived by

recombinant acquisitions of learn-

ing, each moment identified by an

interval of life in which it was

assimilated, but always contempor-

aneously with much else, furnishing a

a crucible of context of some confu-

sion, within an ongoing, organic de-

velopment of the mind and of life,

with occasional side trips to look

at paintings, and other human bod-

ies. (My, how abrupt they can be).

To know something immediately, not

only defies the structure of Na-

ture - and you may say, its compact

with time - it rends and claws

and smashes the organic relation-

ship between development and its

deployment. But I understand our 

Indian mentor's exaltation of the 

bull in the corrida, seeking death. 

Having to know immediately is rou- 

tine, ordinary, to calves at a dis-

pensing teat. To the bull, spontan-

eously inspired by the banderilla,

it's expedient, and useless all at 

once.

His power is not his magnificence,
it's his hysteria, inflicted by un-
examined stimuli. Nobody has any
trouble, unfortunately, in recog-
nising the culture being played 
by banderillas, in the bullhorns
of its warrior cheerleaders. This
would not be conceivable, in the
plodder's naïveté. The futility
of knowing in the upstart mode of
search engines has been exhibited
enough, yet I don't argue for its
abandonment, merely for its appre-
ciation as the parlour game that
it is. We hope to diminish the 
futility of knowing, by the only
means in which we could suggest
any confidence in it: measuring
the vitality of its condition
by its endurance of reflection.

There are the willful naïves and
the natural kind. Who can accept
being imitated by incompetents?

George W.S. Trow

Within the Context

  of No Context

Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997©

Man Ray

George Platt-Lynes

Paris, 1927