Wednesday, June 14, 2017

Befuddled

I remained somewhat befuddled by how a lot of things happen in the world.

– Jill Lepore. From this interesting interview.

1 comment:

G. Verloren said...

"Somewhat befuddled?" Talk about understatement!

The world is beyond us. Not entirely, but largely. The complexity of things builds up way too quickly, our ability to accurately conceive of and predict things is way too limited, and even our capacity to properly perceive and remember what we've witnessed happen is severely lacking.

We are tiny specks of cosmic dust, standing not on the shoulders of giants, but on the collective contributions of billions of other specks of cosmic dust that came before us. We only make slow, incremental progress because we are able to record and transmit information independent of our own minds and memories - and even our ability to that is fundamentally flawed and limited, both by the nature of physical records, and by the imperfections of language and thought themselves.

We are all of us "somewhat befuddled" by how things happen in the world.