Opinion In praise of not knowing

I loaned the record to a friend of mine. For years,as far as we could tell,we were the only people who knew about Harry Partch. He was,in a sense,ours.

This was in the ’80s,a time when there was simply no way of learning much more about Harry Partch,at least not that I knew of. If I were a 17-year-old discovering Harry Partch today,I could Google him,and I’d immediately find the Harry Partch Information Centre,where I’d learn all about his system of intonation with a 43-note octave and his instruments made of bamboo,jet-engine nose cones,artillery-shell casings and whiskey bottles,with names like the Gourd Tree,Boo II,Zymo-Xyl and Marimba Eroica. I’d be able to connect with hundreds of other people who were interested in Harry Partch,avant-garde music and other weird stuff,and not have to feel so eccentric and freakish and alone.

All of which is good,of course. That’s what the Internet is for,yes? Information — zettabytes of information — at our instantaneous disposal.

Except if I’m recalling correctly,adolescents secretly like feeling eccentric and freakish and alone,hoarding pop arcana and cultivating ever-dweebier erudition. They recite lines from cult movies like The Rocky Horror Picture Show,Repo Man and Napoleon Dynamite as though they were passwords to a speakeasy; wear buttons bearing the names of obscure music groups as if they were campaign ribbons; and list favorite films and books and bands on their Facebook pages as if they were as essential as name and age and gender.

That proprietary sense that my friend and I had about Harry Partch,our sense of belonging to an exclusive club of cognoscenti,is why teenagers get so disgusted when everybody else in the world finds out about their favorite band. It’s fun being In The Know,but once everyone’s in it,there’s nothing to know anymore.

When I was older,I pored over a book called Cult Films that described the plots of movies like King of Hearts,Harold and Maude and Behind the Green Door. This was before home video; the only way you were ever going to see any of these films was if they happened to be on TV late at night.

There are some celebrated films that have long been hard to find on DVD or the Internet: Stanley Kubrick’s first film,Fear and Desire,for example. When I found out it had become available,I was almost disappointed. It was fun not being able to see it,not having every last thing a click away. Because what we cannot find inflames the imagination.

Kurt Cobain once said in an interview that long before he’d heard any actual punk rock music,he studied magazine photos of punk musicians and imagined what the music sounded like. It must have sounded to him — who knows? — something like what would later be called grunge.

Instant accessibility leaves us oddly disappointed,bored,endlessly craving more. I’ve often had the experience of reading a science article that purported to explain some question I’d always wondered about,only to find myself getting distracted as soon as I started reading the explanation. Just knowing that there is an answer is somehow deflating. If some cryptozoologist actually bagged a Yeti and gave it a Latin name,it would just be another animal. An intriguing animal,no doubt,but would it really be any more bizarre or improbable than a giraffe or a giant squid?

I hope kids are still finding some way,despite Google and Wikipedia,of not knowing things. Learning how to transform mere ignorance into mystery,simple not knowing into wonder,is a useful skill. Because it turns out that the most important things in this life — why the universe is here instead of not,what happens to us when we die,how the people we love really feel about us — are things we’re never going to know.