Facts are much stranger than mysteries, much harder to explain as the province of a growth on a rock in an ocean of nothing. I've always wondered at the ease with which humans, frail and fleeting as we are, assume ourselves capable of knowing Anything.
But I think now I understand how humans in particular, framed as a race of storytellers, should be so prone to arrogance. Because we really Do understand the stories we make, really Do know everything there is to know about the relationships we imagine between things, and because most of our lives are spent moving each other around with these stories, most of our time is spent knowing everything there is to know about our subjects of interest.
Thus do we approach the natural world in the way we typically do each other: we offer it stories, see how it likes them, and wait for it to respond in kind. These are the ridiculous and nonsensical questions of meaning and purpose we'll never solve, being a demand for opinions from inert matter, but because we think in stories most of the time it's really hard to imagine an open-ended reality without beginnings, endings, and an established back-story.
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