No Knowledge Except of Nothingness

What will it be like when we can download information to our minds?

When the light pours through the stained glass windows into the vessel of the library’s reading room, I get a melancholic feeling that makes whatever ambitions I once held (though they are long buried) seem perfectly irrelevant, and my pals and I start making jokes that are sweeter than they normally are, and I look around at everyone in the reading room and canonize them, or better yet I imagine them in a painting, meaning I assign them to the old master that would capture their face best, Goya or Cassatt or Bastien-Lepage, and I speak their language (or the language that their face or their manner of dress suggests they might speak), not aloud and not to them so much as to the room, in order to tell the populace that I’ve read all the novels in their language and I know the different senses a word can have, how a word for bravery may have become inflected with a similar word for iron, which was mined not far from the city that was the capital city for many centuries, and yes I know about iron and yes I know about the history of the capital, even though I’ve never been there, I can picture very well what it would be like to ride a bicycle down the backstreets and taste that famous antipasto, as a prelude to a more luxurious dinner in the falling evening light by the bay, and these people in the library who perhaps have never even been to the city that I’m imagining will feel it with me in this room and we will gasp when the stimulant of knowledge enlarges our arteries and stains our picture of the world.

And yet, I also look around on days like these and see children, very dreary children, tucked into a corner (often with a blanket thrown over their heads) while a parent or two or three squeeze their hands and whisper harsh words about exams and careers, as information, stacks full of information, gets conveyor-belted into their minute, elastic minds, English and Cantonese and Sanskrit and Manx, geometry and calculus and statistics and group theory, metallurgy and dental hygiene and ocean temperatures and provincial building codes, whatever the bandwidth of the mind allows, whatever the parents decide may be beneficial today, even as the children rock back and forth with their heads cradled in their hands, complaining of nausea and vertigo, lamenting that they haven’t seen a blade of grass in weeks, and on the rare occasion when the parents go to get a snack or use the washroom, I trot over and point to my big, broad face and tell them my pals call me The Man in the Moon (I don’t tell them what that is if they don’t already know) and in the moments when we are alone, I stop the flow of knowledge and encourage them to close their eyes and breathe deeply and put their hands on their chest, left hand on right clavicle, right hand on left clavicle, and to tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, and of course I do not explain how I know that this may help and of course I worry that this is just one more bit of knowledge that an adult is breathlessly forcing into their eardrums, but once in a while the children will visibly relax, their breathing will slow, and an expression in the same neighborhood as a smile may flit across their faces, and I will hurry back across the reading room thinking that at least one thing that I learned in my lifetime has conveyed some benefit to another human being.