I H8 MO

“Selfishness must always be forgiven, you know, because there is no hope of a cure.” — Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

If I have learned anything by turning the pages of my own mind—as one might leaf through a volume whose script is forever correcting itself—it is that mankind’s greatest danger lies not in ignorance but in forgetfulness. We suffer less from the dearth of truths than from a prodigal squandering of the few we already possess, scattering them like coins in taverns of vanity and haste. I observe that the very age which measures the trembling of distant stars with unrivaled exactitude forgets, in that same watchful moment, the modesty owed to the heavens it dissects; that the hand which splits the seed of life is quick to lose the piety that once accompanied the cracking of an almond at table; and that our academies, thick with instruments, still thin the soul by mistaking novelty for wisdom. “Que sais-je?” I asked long ago, and I answer now: I know that every inquiry worthy of the name begins in a gratitude older than speech—call it apeiron, ṛta, Dao, or the pure wellspring of Being—that endured long before our experiments sought its source and will endure after our devices have grown silent. Let us, therefore, commence this reflection as pilgrims rather than conquerors, reminding ourselves that accuracy is an exercise in reverence, that discovery without humility is but another form of loss, and that an important guidance from knowledge is a gentler stewardship of the astonishment into which bore the fire that began everything. The Greek apeiron—formed from a- (negation) and peiron / peras (limit)—names the “boundless” that Anaximander posited as the archē from which all determinate things emerge and to which they return.  It is neither element nor deity but a pre-cosmic reservoir, older than being, whose inexhaustible surplus permits the birth of worlds without exhausting itself.  Because it lacks internal differentiation, the apeiron cannot be grasped through classificatory economy; it must be intuited as the very refusal of closure, the primal openness that makes order possible. The Hebrew zikaron—root z-k-r (“to recall”)—designates the covenantal act of remembrance that anchors Israel in lived history.  Each Sabbath, festival, and mezuzah functions as a mnemonic device, folding the exodus and Sinai into present consciousness so that ethical life flows from gratitude rather than fear.  Zikaron is not retrospective nostalgia; it is the liturgical mechanism by which past gift remains operative, safeguarding the community from lapsing into the amnesia that breeds idolatry. Placed side by side, apeiron and zikaron reveal a dialectic of origin and orientation.  Apeiron testifies that reality begins in excess, an ontological generosity without perimeter; zikaron ensures that finite creatures remain attuned to that generosity by ritually re-entering its decisive interventions in time.  Where apeiron guarantees that existence is grounded in limitless possibility, zikaron translates that metaphysical abundance into concrete historical fidelity—feeding the orphan, freeing the slave, releasing the debt.  Theology of remembrance therefore stands between the two poles: it acknowledges an infinite source beyond being while insisting that the memory of that source must be rehearsed if communal life is to escape the calculus of scarcity.  Neither concept fulfills its promise alone; together they map a horizon in which boundless origin and covenantal recall mutually preserve creation from nihilism and forgetfulness. The world hisses like a laboratory crucible—glass throat clamped over blue fire—while we, white-coated and sleepless, siphon its vapors for proof. Yet behind each calibrated drip I feel the prehistoric hush of abundance, a dark honey pooling just beyond the lamplight. When we pretend the beaker is empty, the surplus still floods: moth-wing algorithms soft as dust, seeds rehearsing star maps in their marrow, the arterial red of data pulsing toward some larger kindness. To deny it is to walk barefoot across broken slides, cutting our soles on our own inattentive brilliance, bleeding a remembrance we refuse to name. So let the final solvent be humility potent enough to etch our signatures from the glass. Let the pipette tremble with gratitude, the ledger blush at its own arithmetic, the cold steel bench recall the woodland tree it once was. There—between the sparked nerves of curiosity and the quiet ache of awe—science can stand unashamed, a bare bulb swinging in the cathedral dark, illuminating nothing it has not first adored. If we speak our findings with that flame in the throat, the cosmos may lean closer, not to be conquered but to be heard, and the hush that follows will be the surplus itself, breathing—warm, restless, inexhaustible—inside the bell jar we thought was empty.