For the Love of Knowing

“The language of truth is simple.”

~ Seneca

Oftentimes I wonder if we waste our time writing of things that have been written about over and over again. And not just since we began to scribe with the quill on a parchment scroll, but even when the humble writing implement was used to scratch symbols onto stone, leaving us signs and hints of how life was, is and always will be.

I ponder this because for all our recording of experiences, messages, and warnings, we fail to act on most of them, if at all.

Today’s dispatch from Time will not tackle the grand failures of how our modern world has ignored the Old World’s warnings. Instead it turns to something smaller and more intimate: the way we, as individuals, neglect the lessons we are given by our parents and the others who raise us, seeing them only from the narrow vantage of our own arrival. This is natural when we are young, but even as we grow older and busier we rarely pause to ask who they really are aside from “our” parents. A certain arrogance clings to us, and it does not help during that horrendous thirty‑something stage (we’ve all been there).

We are all young for a time, until we are not. Bridging that generational divide has been a challenge in every age, though I do wonder if we have dropped the ball compared to the ancients, who seem to have valued wisdom more than we do in the twenty‑first century. They had Seneca, Epictetus, Socrates, Plato, Solon, Polybius, Cicero, Xenophon, Diogenes, and Pliny, just for a start.

However, much has been written by ancient sages about the impatience of the young with their elders. From the comic stage of Aristophanes, where fashionable youth and feckless sons are easy targets, to Plato’s picture of young men who imitate their elders, argue with them, and set themselves up as their equals in pursuit of “good fellowship,” the complaint already sounds familiar.

There are, however, encouraging signs of a revival to learn about the past and its sages. Let’s hope that continues to grow.

For the love of old books, writing tools, and acquisition of wisdom through the ages. Ai generated image.

Of course, generalising proves to be either an under or over-estimation of how things really were in our absence from Life. Books and manuscripts and carvings on stone can give us some idea, but even then, what is written has a bias from one person’s point of view, and then interpreted through another’s lens. Which leads me back to the point of wondering why we continue to write about the same thing without changing what we learn from it.

Why do we have access to ancient texts written by hand on parchment, to medieval manuscripts scribed with quill and ink, and to books whose bindings improve even as their pages grow worn and brown with age, each unfurled by generations who never listen to the messages that reach us through the portal of history?

Despite the warnings and hopes and everything in between, we feel compelled to assert our own independence and, in a perverse way, our superiority over everything that went before us. The ancient world and its gifts of wisdom matter more than ever precisely because those transmissions remain still while we rush past them, waiting for us to look up.

Finding our way back to simplicity may begin with something as small as asking about the lives behind the hands that raised us, and finally listening when they answer.