“Flanders”
4/8/15,
“Knowledge versus Realization”
Aboard DL
48, En route JFK-AMS
This trip
will be the shortest overseas (outside of the Americas) trip I will have ever
taken. I knew this. Until today, I did not realize this. It will be the first time I have been
travelled to mainland Europe since I was 26, over a year and a half ago. I knew this.
Until today, I did not realize this.
Two weeks ago, when I first wrote from Columbia, South Carolina, I noted
in passing this theme, the difference between knowledge and realization. Two days ago, I discussed this idea over
dinner with my grandfather, almost to the point where it became a gag between
us to joke whether we merely did not know something or didn’t realize it. Now, en route to Antwerp, a trip designed
around setting foot inside the home of the Games of the VI Olympiad, and
reliving the title of the movie “In Bruges”, I want to focus more on that theme.
It was either Ayn Rand or Aristotle who said
something to the effect of, “Do not accept as true that which you cannot
incorporate into your existing knowledge set without contradiction.” That is a great quote, and it opens the door
to this theme. Your incorporated
existing knowledge set are all the things that you have realized as true. The new piece of information, yes, you know
it, but you do not realize it until you have incorporated into your existing
knowledge set. Reader, just think how much
floating knowledge you must have in your mind, all the things that you know but
do not fully realize as true.
I know
every single trip I have taken, but, until I thought back and really examined
what I knew and incorporated it as a knowledge set, I did not come to realize
as true the statements in the opening paragraph above. How many times have you either said or heard
something like, “Oh, right, I knew that,” or, “Yeah, I think you might have
told me that.” Both of those statements
are a direct admission of something that you knew but did not realize. There are many reasons why we might absorb a
piece of knowledge but not fully incorporate it, whether out of apathy or
absentmindedness, but that is a topic I will leave to the psychologists.
My analysis is a philosophical one, borne out
of epistemology. There are so many
depths to the epistemological questions, and we can ask ourselves questions about
how we know things or question the sources of our knowledge, and I do not
intend to write an epistemological thesis.
I wrote one in Junior High, and the points in that thesis still stand. This is about how we incorporate the knowledge
we have obtained, and I do not need to debate synthetic and analytical truths,
whether we can have a priori knowledge of synthetic truths, or whether we can
ever know Kant’s three basic questions of God, Freedom, and the Immortal
Soul. I have discussed those topics in
enough depth in previous entries and essays.
What I am interested in is how we often ignore the knowledge we have
legitimately obtained, how we so often don’t know what we know, as it Secretary
Rumsfeld might have quipped. I ask my
reader to think of times in their lives when they came to realize that they had
known something without realizing and to be mindful of the next time it
happened and ask themselves why it happened, why they did not incorporate that
particular piece of knowledge into their existing knowledge set.
For me, with these examples, it is because
there were so many variables and difference analyses that could be performed on
my existing travel set, such as, oh, I haven’t been to a country that begins with
the letter bee other than Belgium, and now I’m going back, even though I have
never been to Bolivia or Bulgaria or Belarus or Bahrain. Yes, I am saying that The Bahamas begins with
a tee and not a bee. That is a
meaningless piece of information, just a curious fact of travel, so there is no
reason I would have incorporated it into my knowledge set, likewise with the
statements in my opening paragraph.
Anyway, enough about this topic, and onto Day 0, though, as has become
my habit, I will begin with recounting Night -1. I got home in time for the Warriors game,
against the Spurs. It is entirely
possible that the Warriors will end the season with the best record in NBA
history, and the Spurs are on track to have the fifth best record in NBA
history. It was truly the clash of the
titans, and I stayed up to watch every minute of it. The Warriors made the Spurs look like a
college basketball team, and a low-seeded one at that. I had done everything required to get ready
for the morning, other than actually put my stuff in the suitcase.
I woke up early enough, but I took too long
getting ready and was a little late to work.
I didn’t take a real lunch break, and I got everything done for the day
that I needed to get done. I had some
pizza in the fridge, so that was my lunch, but I just had one slice, not the
roll as well. At 4 PM, done with my work
and rearing to go, I left the office. I
headed to the cigar shop and lit a Perdomo.
It was a good crowd, and I smoked it for an hour before heading to the
airport. It was a bit of a struggle to
get a cab, and I wound up sharing a cab with someone who needed to be let off
by the bridge. I would usually take the
tunnel, but it didn’t really add much time, certainly less than losing the cab
fight and having to take the next cab would have added.
She was actually kinda chatty (and cute), and
I told her about my trip, my desire to see every Olympic Stadium. I always knew that I would be making this
trip, I suppose ever since I snuck into the Tokyo Stadium. It was at that point that setting foot inside
every Olympic Stadium became a reality.
I was going to have to bite the bullet and spend an obscene amount of money
for a trip to primarily set foot inside a Stadium that I had previously seen
from the outside. Actually, the same
could be said about Athens next month, but I will also be going to Rhodes as
part of that trip. I had seen both
Athens Stadiums from the outside, but I did not go inside. We got to the airport at 6:30 PM, which was
fine for my 8 PM flight, but it would not give me time to write my entry. I had PreCheck, so I breezed through
security, but I was starving. I was
wondering what I’d do for eats as I headed to my gate. Then I saw it.
What did I see? A memory.
A very good memory. A year and a
half ago, on the day of my 27th Birthday, I had lunch with someone
who is very special to me. At the time,
I would have described her something between a crush and an old friend. Now I consider to be my best friend. I hadn’t seen her since the summer I had met
her two years prior, and we arranged to have lunch together. My readers will recall my now forgotten
tradition of having my pre-departure lunch at Hop Won. This was a dear friend I hadn’t seen in over
two years. I was not going to take her
to Hop Won. We, instead, had a great
meal at Pershing Square Café. I will
refer my reader to the entry “27th Birthday Bash – Day 0 – Old Friends”
for more details. Anyway, I bring this
up not to coo over a friendship that has waxed a great deal since then. No, I bring it up because, not having had my
Chinese food, I wound up getting dinner before my flight to Barcelona at the
Panda Express in JFK Terminal 4, Concourse B.
That was the memory I saw this evening.
That was, of course, where I got dinner tonight, in no small part
because that trip was the last time I went to mainland Europe. I could also draw a comparison between
Flanders and Catalonia, but suffice it to say, the goal of this trip will be to
say, “Flanders Complete,” which requires me, in addition to setting foot inside
the Olympic Stadium, to visit sites in Antwerp and in Bruges. I got to the gate, and scarfed down my meal,
not having had a bite to eat (other than the egg roll I ate on the way to the
gate) since around 1 PM, six hours past.
I was starving. The flight was
slightly delayed and overbooked. They
offered a very large reward for anyone who wanted to take a later flight. I would have accepted it, but it would have
meant that I didn’t get to set foot inside the Olympic Stadium, so I passed.
Once I got on the plane, I picked out a movie
to watch: “Sixteen Candles”. Molly
Ringwald truly was the queen of the 80s.
Who else even came close? I had
never seen the movie before, but I loved it.
It was hilarious, and, well, I won’t give away the ending, but the theme
of knowledge versus realization played out.
After the movie was over they were serving dinner, but I was too stuffed
from my Panda Express. I just opted for
a Diet Coke and, later, a coffee. Once
the credits were finished, I opted for some light classical music and proceeded
to write this entry, which I will now close so that I can publish and get a few
hours of sleep before we land in Amsterdam.
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