There are many things I do not know nor understand. Some are too complex for my humble brain. Some simply do not interest me. Many I am too lazy to waste time on. But a few have become truly impenetrable .
To me, impenetrable carries a different connotation than “unknowable” _ an article of faith. I accept many things as unknowable – the meaning of life, the purpose of the universe – and most of the grand religious philosophic questions like free will and the true nature of time. Impenetrable rather means that something may have reasons, but they cannot be discovered by me. The best example is other people’s hidden motivations.
The boundaries between impenetrable and unknowable are tenuous and shifty. Which gets to my main focus of this essay: the future. I always accepted its details as unknowable, but I thought I understood the basic outline.
Nope. Now everything is both unknowable and impenetrable. Next year seems a gray goo, with no connection to the present. I can project no trends .
That annoys me because as an avid SF reader from childhood and student of history still, I unaccountably convinced myself I had some idea of what was happening and where the world might be going .
No more .
HuntingtonHarborThoughts 