Siddhartha
Siddhartha Assignment #1
Option 3c: “I have always thirsted for knowledge, I have always been full of questions. Year after year I have questioned the Brahmins, year after year I have questioned the holy Vedas. Perhaps…it would have been equally good, equally clever and holy if I had questioned the rhinoceros or the chimpanzee. I have spent a long time and have not yet finished in order to learn this…that one can learn nothing.”
When I first read this (very, very late at night of course…) I was struck by how wise Siddhartha sounded. Essentially, learn, learn, and learn until you can learn no more. At that point, you will have realized you have learned nothing.
In many ways, I fell like this is the meaning of life: there is so much to learn about in the world and no way to learn everything. Take today for example—I had a Human Genetics class and, while in the process of learning about Purines and Pyrimidines and how they affect DNA structure, I also learned we have nearly 100 trillion cells in our body. What? How does one topic lead to the next so fluidly? And, accepting that it does, should we be scared of how much potential knowledge is just… out there? Ready to be discovered?
Siddhartha, in saying that we learn nothing is speaking relatively. I learned a few things tonight. But I also gained glimpses into fragments of a whole different subject. Now I’m thinking about 100 trillion cells. Seriously, that’s an enormous number! 100,000,000,000,000. Now that I’ve written out that number, my mind is called to a completely different enormous and large number: 6,020,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. What is that? It’s called Avogadro’s number, and, theoretically, it’s representative of the number of atoms of Carbon in one Mol of Carbon. So we went from Biology to Chemistry with just a single thought. A careless flick of the imagination and we have journeyed into uncharted depths of the “new.”
This last paragraph is a perfect example of Siddhartha’s realization that
Option 3c: “I have always thirsted for knowledge, I have always been full of questions. Year after year I have questioned the Brahmins, year after year I have questioned the holy Vedas. Perhaps…it would have been equally good, equally clever and holy if I had questioned the rhinoceros or the chimpanzee. I have spent a long time and have not yet finished in order to learn this…that one can learn nothing.”
When I first read this (very, very late at night of course…) I was struck by how wise Siddhartha sounded. Essentially, learn, learn, and learn until you can learn no more. At that point, you will have realized you have learned nothing.
In many ways, I fell like this is the meaning of life: there is so much to learn about in the world and no way to learn everything. Take today for example—I had a Human Genetics class and, while in the process of learning about Purines and Pyrimidines and how they affect DNA structure, I also learned we have nearly 100 trillion cells in our body. What? How does one topic lead to the next so fluidly? And, accepting that it does, should we be scared of how much potential knowledge is just… out there? Ready to be discovered?
Siddhartha, in saying that we learn nothing is speaking relatively. I learned a few things tonight. But I also gained glimpses into fragments of a whole different subject. Now I’m thinking about 100 trillion cells. Seriously, that’s an enormous number! 100,000,000,000,000. Now that I’ve written out that number, my mind is called to a completely different enormous and large number: 6,020,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. What is that? It’s called Avogadro’s number, and, theoretically, it’s representative of the number of atoms of Carbon in one Mol of Carbon. So we went from Biology to Chemistry with just a single thought. A careless flick of the imagination and we have journeyed into uncharted depths of the “new.”
This last paragraph is a perfect example of Siddhartha’s realization that