Assaulting the Spire

I am a thinker and very consistent one at that. I ponder questions and have numerous wonders every day….many more than any normal man might have in a week or even a month. However, despite my constant questions and pondering in to the workings of the world I have started to come to a very dark and bleak conclusion.

“Knowledge does not bring about freedom, but only seeks to imprison us more.”

You can quote me on that. I don’t mind. Now, before you readers dismiss this as a truly unsound thought let me bring to you an excerpt from a book that I have been reading. The upcoming musings is from the character Giuseppe Baldini who is a pretty significant character in the book “Perfume” which was written by Patrick Suskind. A strange place to find a thought provoking paragraph indeed, but nonetheless it got my intuitive wheels turning and I would like to share this small section with you:

Man’s misfortune stems from the fact that he does not want to stay in the room where he belongs. Pascal said that. And Pascal was a great man, a Frangipani of the intellect, a real craftsman so to speak, and no one wants one of those anymore. People read incendiary books now by Huguenots or Englishmen. Or they write tracts or so-called scientific masterpieces that put anything and everything in question. Nothing is supposed to be right anymore, suddenly everything ought to be different. The latest is that little animals never before seen are swimming about in a glass of water. They say that syphilis is a completely normal disease and no longer the punishment of God. God didn’t make the world in seven days, it’s said, but over millions of years, if it was He at all. Savages are human beings like us; we raise our children wrong; and the earth is no longer round like it was, but flat on the top and bottom like a melon — as if it made a damn bit of difference!

In every field people question and bore and scrutinize and pry and dabble with experiments. It’s non longer enough for a man to say that something is so or how it is so — everything now has to be proven besides, preferably with witnesses and numbers and one or another of these ridiculous experiments. These Diderots and d’Alemberts and Voltaires and Rousseaus or whatever names these scribblers have–there are even clerics among them and gentlemen of noble birth!– they’ve finally managed to infect the whole society with their perfidious fidgets, with their sheer delight in discontent and their unwillingness to be satisfied with anything in this world, in short, with the boundless chaos that reigns in side their own heads!

Now, obviously with the rhetoric used in the excerpt the timeframe in which Baldini is speaking is during the time when man was coming in to the age of expanding science. When man was pushing in to new frontiers through experimentation and constant trial and error. It created a wonderful world that we now live in, but it seems that it only created a beautiful world which we are constantly throwing away.

I don’t mean in the sense of wasteful use like the environmentalist crazies or the global warming alarmists might think, but I believe we are always destroying our own aesthetic creations just as soon as we form them. Just as Baldini said in the very first line “Mans misfortune stems from the  fact that he does not want to stay in the room where he belongs” and that is the most truthful comment anyone could have ever said. I could have just written that one line in this post and it might have had a more profound impact than my scattered rantings, but as I said before….I am one of the thinkers and therefore I have to analyze it. I couldn’t just be satisfied with the absolute notion that Pascal had said it, meant it, and just left it alone allowing the purpose of the comment to take its full effect and sink in.

No, I’ve bastardized it with my own brand of interpretation and have ventured in the realm of asking “why?” just as all thinkers do.

Strange isn’t it?

Despite the time era difference has anything in todays world really changed from the world that Baldini spoke of? We’re still just as unsatisfied as the scientists he spoke of and it looks as if there is no real sign of that trend slowing down at all. We live in a world of discontent where we never ever want to be where we are supposed to be, and I think that this perpetual spiral in to a future of never ending questions will see us to our downfall.

Why? Because we cant stop. We are unable to stop, and it is because we cannot find peace with anything that we will refuse to stop. Constantly striving towards understanding everything and destroying the mysteries and wonderments that made life fascinating.  I no longer care to analyze the world about me, but have now made a personal decision to only experience it as it had been intended. Whether this life was created by God or by chaotic chance….I no longer will be held a prisoner to the question “Why?” but shall take life for what it is.