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KNOWING We've gone beyond that little goal we thought important at twelve. We've said goodbye to our dream of nineteen. Our duty, at thirty, was more important, but only then. And now, as we view the world through current glasses, we sense the new prescription is old, anew. The sand of our stance is ashift, again, breathing new life into our old perspective. We ascribe it to age, of course, making excuses for wisdom as if that were necessary. For we were so certain, then, that each time was our best. And we were right, of course, each time. With time, we came to realize that each final step we'd made was only one more along the way and we'd wondered, then, how long the way was. We became less certain that each step was the last... for we were walking, still... and the horizon seemed ever less definite ... though someone said it was only a line to cross. There was that early pride when we'd isolated the colors of our spectrum, at that time. But, just when we'd learned well the nature of red, yellow, and blue, we discovered there were also purple, orange, and green. In time, even that was not the end, for we had to reconcile the difference of brown or gray. And in our farthest vision, we can see an elusive panorama of subtle opal and iridescence. When we knew that, we knew there was no end, that our understanding was only primary and the world was quite beyond the tertiary. We wondered how we could ever know it all. But that became unimportant when we came to realize the ultimate paradox: The greater the knowledge, the greater the knowledge of what remains unknown. |