There is perhaps a uniquely human instinct to leave our mark on the world, if nothing else to simply say that we were once here to whomever comes later. People have a tendency to carve their names or initials on rocks, trunks of trees, walls, benches, or some other hard surface they know is not going to be withered away by the elements too soon, especially if they’ve spent a lot of time in that place. The image that best illustrates this instinct to me is the stenciled hands humans have left, thousands of years ago, on the walls of Cueva de las Manos, in Santa Cruz, Argentina.
This website, I suppose, is also in part inspired by that same egoic instinct to try and preserve something of oneself. It also strikes me as an excellent idea to make this website the home or the central hub of my digital, online self. It’s a space that I own, and ownership makes one think about a thing differently; which is why I’ve gone to the trouble of designing this website from scratch, to suit my tastes and preferences.
If the writing that is to follow on this site is to have a theme, then it shall be the pursuit of truth and knowledge from the perspective of a single individual, starting somewhat from the beginning. I’m not interested in writing for the sake of writing, and for that reason I suppose I’m not a real writer. Writing for me is always a secondary activity, a means to an end, downstream from exploration, learning, doing, and thinking.
The world we find ourselves in is fundamentally mysterious—and so are we ourselves—but most of us, being the pragmatic and responsible grown ups that we are, go about our days as if this was not the case, as if everything around us was perfectly ordinary and familiar. When Benjamin Franklin once noted that, “Many people die at twenty five and aren’t buried until they are seventy five,” this ubiquitous incuriosity of much of the grown up world must have been what he meant.
There’s much that I don’t know but wish to know, and much that I don’t understand but wish to understand. I hope this website would serve as a chronicle, for my future self if for no one else, of my gradually decreasing, but always infinite, ignorance.