One Will Never Experience Or Know Everything

Life Encompassed

How often I have said,
“This will never do,”
Of ways of feeling that now
I trust in, and pursue!

Do traverses tramped in the past,
My own, criss-crossed as I forge
Across from another quarter
Speak of a life encompassed?

Well, life is not research.
No one asks you to map the terrain,
Only to get across it
In new ways, time and again.

How many such, even now,
I dismiss out of hand
As not to my purpose, not
Unknown, just unexamined.

Donald Davie from Collected Poems

Mark Jarman, in Body and Soul: Essays on Poetry, comments: This poem reminds me of the limitations of critical understanding and opinion, and also of the importance and necessity of growth in the life of the mind.

Thomas Edison: Being Always Right

A long career of being always right made it impossible for Thomas Edison to endure being wrong. Committed thoroughly to the use of direct electrical current, Edison unscrupulously fought the use of alternating current. He lobbied New York State into adopting a.c. for its newly devised electric chair (and a.c. is indeed more efficient in electrocution than direct current), and then he pointed with great horror to the electric chair as an example of the deadly nature of a.c.

(p.158)

from Isaac Asimov’s Book of Facts, edited by Isaac Asimov