I should know everything that’s happening at this moment, at every point on the earth. I should be able to penetrate the thoughts of my contemporaries and of people who lived a few generations ago, and two thousand and eight thousand years ago. I should. So what? –Czeslaw Milosz, Roadside Dog
So what, Milosz? If you don’t know, then I certainly don’t either. You were a Nobel Prize recipient; I’m a confused college student. I can’t quite tell if the fact that someone so well-read and intelligent still felt as ignorant as I do is reassuring or thoroughly depressing.
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Sitting in class one day in the spring of my junior year of high school, I had an intense realization regarding—of all things—polar bears. I forget why the topic of polar bears had come up in discussion, but I remember very clearly the jolt to my system that occurred when I contemplated the reality that all of the polar bears in existence were, even as we spoke, doing things.
On the one hand, this is obvious. Of course they were; how could they not be? It’s not like anybody would ever suggest otherwise. But stop and think about it for a second. Right now—right this instant—as you’re reading this, there are polar bears going about their daily business. There are about 20,000 individual polar bears living their individual lives, all at once. There are 500,000 meerkats and two million moose. There are ten quintillion (that’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000) insects alive at any given moment.
There are over seven billion human beings.
95,000 people have died already today. Each of these individuals had a story, and I never knew any of them. Right now, 230,000 newborns are experiencing their first day on earth. I want to know how it feels to have grown up in Longyearbyen, Norway, where the sun does not rise between November and March. I want to know what it is to view life through the lens of a different gender, a different race, a different religious upbringing or socioeconomic status or sexual orientation. Hell, I want to know what it’s like to be a polar bear.
And I want to know information—more information than I could ever read or process or understand. In the same passage quoted above, Milosz also writes:
In my home, books spill from the shelves; they lie in piles on furniture, on the floor, barring passage from room to room. I cannot, of course, read them all, yet my wolfish eyes constantly crave new titles.
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I love libraries immensely. Left to my own devices, I can wander the stacks for hours and feel myself actually physically relaxing. And yet, I cannot help lamenting all of the things I will never learn, all of the things I will learn but won’t remember.
I want to know everything that has happened in 200,000 years of human history, and I want to know everything that is going to happen after I’m gone. I’d like to witness all of the small, beautiful natural occurrences that are taking place, unseen, all over the globe. Maybe that’s greedy of me. I don’t know. I just know that it’s hard to wrap my mind around the fact that, no matter how long and fulfilling my life may be, I will still die having never encountered even a fraction of what the world has to offer.
Perhaps though, this individual limitedness is important, even necessary. It’s a humbling force as well as a motivator. It makes me want to seek things out. It frustrates, overwhelms, and even scares me at times, but it also makes me watch and listen a little bit more closely. I doubt that I’ll ever attain enough understanding to satisfy me, but I do find that the pursuit of understanding yields an element of satisfaction in and of itself. Milosz toiled on, and while I certainly can’t claim many other similarities to a literary genius, so will I. It’s difficult to accept the fact that I can’t learn everything, but maybe I can come to find at least some measure of fulfillment in resolving to learn everything I can.
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