We are afraid of what we don't know, he said.
"It's a kind of 'fear-of-the-unknown-phenomenon'."
I rustled through my lecture notes and found that
on my fifth page for the lecture of September, the 17th,
I had planned a visit to the Smithsonian Institute.
They were charging eleven dollars a student at that
time, and I had wanted my class to understand a
little bit about the art of collection: anthropology, so to speak.
Why would anyone want to relive the past, he said.
"Peoples' lives aren't at all interesting."
I cut him off there and told him that as long as
there weren't two billion Ben Steins in the world,
that the "individual" would be unique, and thus,
exciting. He retorted...
"Don't we know enough about people? Why not try, I
don't know, space? Or physics? Information, where does it go?"
By way of knowing about these unknowns, we must know "us,"
which is to attempt at learning the unknown, I said.
