What is the ultimate truth about ourselves?

Various answers suggest themselves.

We are a bit of stellar matter gone wrong.

We are physical machinery—puppets that strut and talk and laugh and die as the hand of time pulls the strings from beneath.

But there is one elementary inescapable answer.

We are that which asks the question.

Arthur Eddington

The art of the brain is to liken and learn, never resist a mystery, and question everything, even itself.

Especially itself.

Diane Ackerman, Alchemy Of Mind

Participating in a collective process of interpretation amounts to publicly vouching for the value of what is being interpreted.

Participants in a collective process of interpretation have a double stake in the value of the text they are working on and in the authority of its author.

Participating in such a collective process involves not just an intellectual but also—and more surely—a social benefit, that of belonging, of getting recognition as a person in the know, capable of appreciating the importance of a difficult great thinker.

Not participating, on the other hand, may involve the cost of being marginalised and of appearing intellectually stale and flat.

Dan Sperber, Guru Effect

“But what does it mean?”

It’s not enough to be startling, beautiful, artful, it has to mean, even if much of life simply is.

Diane Ackerman, Alchemy Of Mind

To speak of knowledge is futile.

All is experiment and adventure.

We are forever
mixing ourselves
with unknown quantities

Virginia Woolf, Waves