Two Professors

Two professors were walking behind me on my way home to TKE today. The conversation went something like this:

"Yes, but polarity is important so you can see the electron valence and..."
"Sure, it's important, and according to the Aufbau principle, the electrons of an atom occupy quantum level..."

Or something like this. I know very little about chemistry and even less about the atom. But I was struck at the historicity of this discussion (I can't rightly call it an argument since I could not distinguish two sides even though it may have been exactly that). But the historicity was readily apparent. This was not an undergraduate discussion, this was a discussion that was years in the making with multiple lectures, notes, experiments and textbooks involved in order for these two men two effortlessly talk about a subject in such a way that it was basically a different language for me.

That's when I realized what the life of a scholar or theorist meant. It meant continuously training the mind until one can speak about fetishization, reliquaries, the trafficking between thing and object, Platonics, tropes and instantly realized obsolescence until you are well-versed in what basically accounts for the language of an intellectual microsociety. And I wondered if that was what I want before I realized that I was already on the road leading to a world of theorizing and critically analyzing every aspect of life as it is lived.

And I decided that life is a grand adventure. Beyond that, it is also something that can be analyzed and dissected. But this is a spice one must use sparingly. Some analysis makes you positive you get life, you really get it. In fact, you are getting more out of life at every minute than most people are. And you are happy about that, not because it makes you better, but because it makes the world better. But at some point you analyze something too much, you see the joke so clear that it is no longer funny. You understand the recipe so well that the joy of the mysterious aroma is dead. Life becomes death at the moment you know everything about it.

So a toast to those of us who know just enough to know that we don't want to know too much more. And a sad lament to those who have gone so far down the road without knowing where it leads only to realize at the last moment that they can't turn back.

Of course, no one can ever turn back. Being on the road has it's perils.