Herman Hesse from his book ‘Siddhartha’:

“Now, he thought, since all these most easily perishing things have slipped from me again, now I’m standing here under the sun again just as I have been standing here a little child, nothing is mine, I have no abilities, there is nothing I could bring about, I have learned nothing.

“How wondrous is this! Now, that I’m no longer young, that my hair is already half gray, that my strength is fading, now I’m starting again at the beginning, and as a child!

“Again, he had to smile. Yes, his fate had been strange! Things were going downhill with him, and now he was again facing the world void and naked and stupid. But he could not feel sad about this, no, he even felt a great urge to laugh, to laugh about himself, to laugh about this strange, foolish world.“

I quoted this in my book Devolving in Eden for a very good reason. I feel this. Perhaps everyone feels it as they grow and change with age; but the emphasis for me is the idea that we start again as a child which rings truer than I’d ever believed possible as the years pass. Facing the world ‘void, naked and stupid’ sums it up well. Albert Einstein expressed that we stand virtually incapable of understanding our universe. Socrates understood that admitting ignorance in the face of knowledge is the only real and true wisdom.

To admit such thinking is not weakness nor sarcastic hubris. Things change as the arrow of time flies and we are dragged along with it. The idea that we can be arrogantly ‘knowledgeable’ of ‘understanding’ is a laugh.

I may retain facts, I might have opinion, I may draw conclusion, but to say that I ‘know’ is flat-out wrong. I don’t. And it becomes apparent to me more and more that I am void, naked and stupid in the face of the universe. That makes me smile with glee.