It’s All About Understanding

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In yesterday’s Lowestoft Journal an article was headed ‘Rare Lowestoft Porcelain Items to Go Under the Hammer’. I smiled.

Apparently, Lowestoft Porcelain was first established in 1757… Household pieces such as teapots, tea bowls were produced… Specially commissioned pieces were inscribed with names and dates… The Crown Street factory closed in 1802… The auction’s on Wednesday, October 21, at the Victoria Hotel… Estimated prices range from £30 to £14,000…

You have to understand… ‘Under the Hammer’ doesn’t mean that valuable, rare antiques will be smashed…

Percy, on his first day at school, learnt, ‘two times two equals four’. He repeated it at home that night. His parents were amazed. After one day at school, he was already multiplying. What they’d always suspected was true. Their son was a genius. The proud parents congratulated their son.

Percy looked puzzled. ‘What’s a two?’ he asked… He could say the words, but didn’t understand what they meant.

I’ve had conversations this week with folks trying to understand why things happen… The teenaged-girl on life support, who may not survive… The complicated pregnancy with an uncertain outcome… The child being bullied… Failed attempts at mending broken family relationships.

Understanding is at best limited, at worst non-existent. The ‘why?’ question remains unanswered

This morning I came across ‘Flower in the Crannied Wall’ by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1863):

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

Tennyson is writing at a time of technological progress, scientific advancement and evolutionary understanding. Great questions are being answered; it seems that all is there to be understood.

In a little wild flower, growing uninvited, in a Hampshire wishing-well, where there’s no conflict between God and science, between beauty and reason, between the ‘what’ and the ‘why?’, Tennyson is content to admit that he doesn’t understand.

11 thoughts on “It’s All About Understanding”

  2. “In a little wild flower, growing uninvited, in a Hampshire wishing-well, where there’s no conflict between God and science, between beauty and reason, between the ‘what’ and the ‘why?’, Tennyson is content to admit that he doesn’t understand.

    If only more people in this world would adhere to those words.

    However, I have spent most of my seventy-eight years trying to understand.

    Darwin’s On the Origins of Species is now accepted evolutionary theory by the majority.  And, who can know, or dream, what new amazing natural laws will come to light in the future.

    I read that Tennyson, although not fully subscribing to Darwin’s theories was extremely interested in Robert Chambers’ Natural History of Creation.  Darwin felt the book was a preparation for his more considered book.

    I wonder what all three would feel about the science discoveries of the twentieth century and even more about the science of the twenty first.

    Unfortunately, at present many, including myself, are losing a little of that admiration and beginning to wonder if it will not bring salvation, in whatever way you believe salvation will be, but the end of humanity.

    I tend to agree with Ricki Gervais when he said that he is “optimistic that it will all turn out ok when humanity is wiped out”.

    Take care and keep on trying to understand.

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      1. I honestly wonder whether we are Malcolm.

        If God honestly knew what a mess humans were going to make of this planet shouldn’t he have been the theist God and intervened to stop us before it was too late. Surely, if he does not intervene, the deist God of most it seems, then he’s set most of us up to fail. I surely have.

        I’m a lost cause I expect. But then every decision I make is formed by social learning and DNA. What hope for me then? Don’t answer as I know your answer.

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  4. Love that quote and image from Tennyson, “Half conceal and half reveal.” is so embarrassingly true. We writers peek out from behind our doorways, hurling pebbles at the windows of other folks, hoping to wake someone still sleeping in their home.

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