Being a chronic holist and aspiring raconteur of recursion, I note that the value of the vast and swelling tides of available books, magazines, articles, videos and mixed media montage is a function of the abstract as abbreviation and a (temporal) compression of synopsis as acceleration.
This is, of course, a matter of time, of measure and of the fleeting opportunities any and all of us ever find to invest what few moments we might ultimately possess into the diverse proliferation of interesting artefacts, entities and systems of experience that encircle and define us. This is the flip-side of the ascendancy and abstraction of information and the technologies with which we engage it.
I endlessly begin literary or academic journeys through these forests of facts but, to be honest, in the last few years I have found that while revelling in the acquisition of a conceptual metamorphosis that words bring, I am impatient to read, to understand, to garner comprehension and to know, that is – to urgently finish this process that only ever acquires value and unacknowledged utility inversely by the extent to which it remains incomplete.
I wait to finish a page, a chapter, a book and forget, perhaps not alone, that it is not what is known that matters anywhere near so much as the ways in which we know it.
Context: Ethnographies of Waiting
Daedelus Kite 