Monday 13th March, 2006. To town.

I arrived at the bus stop today and all four people waiting there looked at me as if my flies were undone. I was pretty sure they weren’t because it was windy and I would have been able to feel a draft. So who knows?

I watched the familiar route roll by in the hazy spring light and felt generally positive about the day. This is the time of year for digging up roads and pavements, apparently. Every few hundred yards there was a hole surrounded by orange plastic barriers and a pile of dirt. Occasionally there was a man in a yellow jacket digging, or pointing, or drinking tea, and I was suddenly overcome by a deep desire to know why they were digging each particular hole. I wonder how many holes are dug in error? (‘Really? Oh, you see I was holding the plans like this’).

Fortunately my excavational curiosity passed. It would just have to remain as one of the many things I didn’t know about the world, and I have, at least partially, come to terms with the reality that there will be countless such things. Sometime during my school years, while I was amassing knowledge at an unchecked rate (at least that’s how if felt), this awful truth dawned on me: there will always be a vast, huge, unimaginable plethora of knowledge that I would not only be unsure about (such as the labelling terms used in the cross section of a river bend), but that I would never have the slightest clue about.

Now this wasn’t an epistemological worry, for I’m pretty sure that I had no idea that the word ‘epistemological’ even existed. I wasn’t worried about the frightening limit to what could be known by us as humans. (If no one else can know it either, that’s fine by me.) I was worried by the realisation that there would always be things that other people knew that I didn’t. Early on in school, teachers are reluctant to tell you that the limits of knowledge go beyond the ‘Fun with Physics’ textbook. Once I learnt what electricity is and why something has a colour, I thought I was well on my way. But it was the lowly calculator that broke me. Anyway, such is life, and man is humbled by his own achievements. I pressed the ‘stop’ button and said thanks to the driver. I will never know how to drive a bus like he does.