KNOWLEDGE IS UNLIMITED

 

KNOWLEDGE IS UNLIMITED

            No encyclopedia of world history has been written and will ever be written with the complete knowledge from the beginning and the end of this world when it will cease to exist with all its material and existential contents.

            The current position is that knowledge is growing moment after moment and human beings are exhorted to update themselves actively. Unnecessary rest is undesirable. The concept of a learning society which came into vogue a few years back will remain valid eternally.

            The English poet Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-92) wrote two contrasting poems The Lotus Eaters and Ulysses. The former describes idlers but the latter whose pursuit of experience and knowledge is un-satiable. For our purpose here is what Ulysses, the hero of the poem has to say about the infinity of knowledge:

“It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags

Match’d with an aged wife, I meet and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and knownot me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees. All times I have enjoy’d

Greatly, have suffer’d greatly bot with those

That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when

Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades

Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;

For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known; citizens of men

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;

And drunk delight of battle with my peers,

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’

Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades

For ever and forever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!

As tho’ to breathe were Life! Life piled on life

   Were all too little, and of one to me

   Little remains: but every hour is saved

   From that eternal silence, something more,

   A bringer of new things; and vile it were

   For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

   And this gray spirit yearning in desire

   To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

   Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

 

                                 ……..           

                Re-read , remember and make the following lines your religious belief for ever:

                      How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

                      To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!

                                 

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G.R.Kanwal

27 Ocober 2025                         

 

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