What do Ya Know?
I was having lunch at the Dushanbe Tea House in Boulder, Colorado when I spotted Jake Noone. He was someone I knew casually as a member of my swim club. I waved to him and he picked up his tea, came over to my table and sat down.
A little surprised, I asked him, “What do ya know, Jake?”
He surprised me even more with his response, “Not much. Been studying philosophers, even some Irish ones. But heads or tails of any it, make out I Kant.”
To make sure I got the pun, he spelled out Kant, “K-A-N-T.”
He continued, “Ya know, me brother and me come from County Sligo in the ould sod. Me mam, Bridget O’Dowd, married me da, Sean Noone, cause he got her in the family way with me brother and me. I come out first and Esau come out second. Me da liked to make jokes, and when he seen me with no hair on me head and me brother with hair, he thought it would be fun to have the priest baptize me Jacob and him Esau.
“But just like them Jews tell the story, I was me mam’s favorite, and da took to Esau. Me and Esau got along lots better than them brothers did and I never stole nuthin of his or his blessin. I ain’t no smarter than him nuther. Both of us ain’t so sure of what we know.”
His story intrigued me. Furthermore hearing his brogue and the way he misused pronouns and verbs, I was surprised by his saying that he was studying philosophers and his pun on the name of Kant. I asked, “Is English your first language?”
He chuckled and said, “Got you a little up in the air with my speech pattern didn’t I? I really know how to speak the king’s English properly. But sometimes I just like to drift into the common speech of some of my compatriots.
“Esau and I have doctorates in English literature from Harvard and we also studied linguistics there. Irish dialects are directly related to the English language and both of us are fluent in Erse and how it affects the English spoken in Ireland.”
I hadn’t expected that. After all, we were only casual acquaintances. But since the conversation had started with Jake’s unexpected response to the meaningless small talk of my greeting I decided to continue, “So what is it you’re searching for in the works of philosophers?”
“The connections between reason, if there is such a thing, morality, and aesthetics,” he muttered, “the meaning of space and time and when it began and understanding of infinity.
“And I think about the questions of what is reality and whether your reality can ever be the same as mine because we experience different events and even when we experience the same event, we experience it differently.
“You probably know that twins communicate with and understand each other on a level that people who are not twins don’t. My discomfort with understanding what is knowledge is consonant with Esau’s. We are both turning to the study of mathematics to try to understand reality, much as Einstein did. But it is still a puzzlement.”
I did not know how to respond. Having myself studied Immanuel Kant’s works at length, I questioned his atheism and the validity of his belief that that universal democracy and international cooperation would lead to perpetual peace. I was skeptical that it would happen in the unplanned way he envisioned.
I thought to myself, The current state of the world is not one of peace, despite the great powers having not fought a war with each other since World War II, and democracy does not prevail worldwide, despite the overthrow of many dictators in Latin America. Authoritarian regimes prevail in Asia and the states that made up the Soviet Union. Theocracies rule in the Arab and Iranian worlds with the age-old dispute between Sunnis and Shi’ites and their offshoots unresolved. The dispute between Christianity and Islam goes on. Israelis and Palestinians are still at each other’s throats. Religious bigotry is common in America. The political parties are at loggerheads to such a degree that compromise between them in congress and the Whitehouse seems to be impossible. The rich are getting richer at the expense of the less fortunate. And the Kremlin suppresses any dissent. So Kant’s belief that democracy will prevail is a mirage that hides a worldwide miasma.
We left the question of whether mathematics and the study of the cosmos would answer any of Jake’s and Esau’s question about what is reality unsolved, finished our tea and parted.
Lying abed that night, I thought of verses from Khayyam’s Rubaiyat and recited softly to myself,
“Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same Door as in I went.”
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