BEFORE, AFTER OR NEXT TO
Wednesday Apr. 18, 2018
Every thought you ever have, every question you might ever pose – just plug that question into your browser. Answers will immediately appear. More likely, in order of likelihood, a few hundred thousand pages of searches will be right there for you to satisfy every insatiable curiosity (though I don’t recall paging past more than 30, so why millions in the queue?).
Every question ever posed has been posed many times before.
Who can imagine having a truly unique question to which there is no answer?
There are billions of us. Yes, many obvious questions get asked over and over. And we must wonder, what question could I ask that Google/Bing/all the others only show one(1) search result? Or zero? Might that be the biggest intellectual challenge, to ask a question nobody has asked before?
It’s a rabbit hole.
I remember libraries and encyclopedias, no mouse, no database – just pages to flip through. It wasn’t so much a matter of finding everything I was looking for, but the fun of finding what I wasn’t looking for because it was before, after or next to the thing I was researching.
I wonder if there is a lesson there – that we should look to what is next to what we find, what is before and after. And when we meet people, we could pay more attention to the person with them or next to them – imagine what treasures we might find!
