I remember as a kid my dream was to eventually know everything there is to be known.

That's why the Heisenberg uncertainty principle broke me as badly as it did at 15.

No, no, not for the surface reason.

The HUP just states that you can't perfectly know both the mass and the position 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘧𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘭𝘺 accurately. At a point getting a more precise knowledge of one requires you have less precise knowledge of the other.

That I could live with.

The only way we could learn these things in the first place was ultimately by 𝘩𝘪𝘵𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮 with something, interacting with them. 𝘛𝘩𝘢𝘵'𝘴 what broke me. The omnipresence of violence.

The true reason I held the idea of knowing everything in such high regard was because I always loved the idea of God as divine watchmaker, one who merely set things into motion and then stepped back to smile on his creation.

No interaction needed past that initial, soft, touch.

I had already seen so much violence on all different levels of abstraction: Physical, social, romantic, intellectual, conceptual. And I knew I was far from innocent. I had 𝘪𝘨𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘦𝘥 so much violence on my own terms in my life.

I always dreamt, "If I had only known..."

But knowing will always require interacting.

Knowing will always require touching.

And any time you touch something, a tiny bit of it stays on your finger pads, a tiny bit is lost to the wind.

A big part of my life has been to perform that process, itself, as oddly beautiful.

There might be things which exist for which this isn't true, like mathematical objects, but they're not things that I think have a one-to-one correspondence with the universe we live in.

In fact if I found out somehow mathematical objects *did* "change" by the touch of being apprehended by the human mind, I would suddenly become very interested in the question of finding where they actually are in the universe. That's a queer property to have if you're not here.

But I'm not really concerned with that for the time being. I like things I can touch.

Like sheep.

Sheep are soft to the touch, and they don't seem to mind if you take their wool every now and then.

It's violence, but a transforming violence that creates as much as it destroys.

And all I can hope is all the tiniest things in the universe, all the atoms and electrons and quarks and strings and ?????s, somehow understand that the constant exchange of blows gives rise to a beauty that could similarly never arise without them. Without all of us being tough.