I have spent many years as teacher thinking about the thing Walker Percy called the “strangest object” in the universe, and what this same object does in its apparently brief time on an obscure planet in the cosmos. First of all, man wonders, with Augustine, “What is time anyhow?” He wonders why its passing motion, its beginning, middle, and end, includes him. The chief thing that this “rational being,” as Aristotle called him, seeks to learn about is his own existence in a universe that he did not himself create. The novas, quasars, pulsars, and black holes are not looking at this tiny primate. He is looking at them.
Plato, a name to be spoken of only in reverence, tells us that this “strangest being” has something about him more powerful than “a thousand eyes.” It is his mind, without which he cannot see the truth – something which he seeks to know even when he wonders if he can find it. And the very key, as Plato wrote, to answering the question of whether truth is knowable lies precisely in… those “useless subjects,” those we study “for their own sake.”
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