CURIOSITY CAN KILL MORE THAN CATS

Curiosity may have killed a great many cats and people, but both of us still remain desperately curious. About our world and especially about ourselves. After all, am I not that object in life about which to be most curious...?

This fixation with self begins at the very beginning. At first there was that serpent, later the tribal witch doctor, still later our philosophers, painters and playwrights. We have gone to each for answers. From Aristotle to Oprah, from hieroglyphics to body art, from Aeschylus to Arthur Miller, they've done their best. But now in our present age, enter the scientist-technologist. Humanity's newest Delphic Oracles.

Be it minds like Einstein and Hawking coupled with technocrats like Jobs and Gates, we are today the beneficiaries of ideas and instruments not even emperors could have dreamed. However, when living with such a flood, the trick is to know how not to drown. How to swim with the successes, not the sharks.

Here I'm thinking of random examples. Like my friends who are so technologically dependent, they can be found for days inside their homes checking television & computer weather data without ever stepping outside to actually feel the weather. [Something like those forecasters who report from inside their hermetically sealed, windowless TV studios]. Or the researchers from the University of Vanderbilt who recently studied the brain circuitry of memory-building, apparently without any reference to those masters of memory like Marcel Proust and Thomas Wolfe. Or the BMW drivers who smartly use their GPS system to find where they are going, then their steerage system to automatically park, often without a sentient clue as to the amazing spaces and places outside the BMW.

I know, I know, this sounds like another Luddite rant against machines, Or a later edition of the Twilight Zone fear of computers. Actually, it is none of these. Nothing so academic or pretentious. If anyone in my family really cares to know, it's mostly about what happened once I bought that scientifically-designed pillow meant to perfectly conform to my head, guaranteeing me the ultimate in psychosomatic comfort. Well -- it didn't!!

I did my own scientific-technological research. After wrestling with that bewitched rubber pillow for three weeks, I discovered science and technology simply can't improve the cozy cushiness and comfort of my own little long-lived-with down pillow. And that, fellow cats & seekers, is a fact....