{"id":264,"date":"2005-06-21T22:21:28","date_gmt":"2005-06-21T20:21:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/wordpress\/?p=264"},"modified":"2005-06-21T22:21:28","modified_gmt":"2005-06-21T20:21:28","slug":"the-curse-of-knowledge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/?p=264","title":{"rendered":"The curse of knowledge"},"content":{"rendered":"

Knowing too much can be a curse. In this case it’s the knowledge of good and evil. Of course I’m told there is no good and evil really, and sometimes I even think I manage to grasp it, but buying into my judgemental partitioning of the world for now, I sometimes hark back for the days I would find a bottle of Tassies perfectly adequate, or a David Eddings book the best way to spend a weekend. (If evil is too strong to describe Tassies, the infamous red wine blend, let’s just call it bad. However evil is a good description of David Edding’s atrocious Mallorean<\/a>). Nowadays I’m more likely to be satisfied with a bottle of Longridge Brut lovingly (and expensively) bought from the farm after a wine-taste at the farm, or a masterpiece by Ben Okri<\/a> or David Zindell’s<\/a> science fiction (his Neverness<\/em> provides the name of this blog). <\/p>\n

I recently visited a friend, and the wine was flowing in copious quantities, but it all tasted like drek to me. Since I can hardly insist on being supplied R90 bottles of wine on demand, I eventually made do with water, and probably had less fun than my 20 year-old counterpart would have (but then I also remembered the evening slightly more clearly).<\/p>\n

Similarly, I recently read a book<\/a> by James Patterson, called Roses are Red<\/a>. It was truly awful. I groaned at every second sentence, the grim cliches, the torturous metaphors. Yet I finished the entire 400 odd pages in one evening. It’s the kind of book I may have enjoyed as a teenager, the gruesome murders and sexual titillation. And it must have still had some appeal for me to keep going. <\/p>\n

I guess the more you know the less you know, and the more you judge the worse everything is.<\/p>\n

By the way, no prizes for guessing the title of the sequel to Roses are Red. Aaarrrghhhh!<\/p>\n

Related links:<\/p>\n