In Always Coming Home, a woman named Stone Telling writes the story of her life. Of the writing, she says:

A year before this now where I write this page, after the Madrone Lodge people had asked me to write the story of my life, I went to Giver Ire’s daughter, the story writer, and asked if she could teach me how to write a story, for I did not know how to go about it. Among other things Giver suggested to me was that in writing the story I try to be as I was at the time of which I am writing. This has been a good deal easier than I thought it would be, until now, this place now, where my father has come into the house.

It is hard to remember how little I knew. And yet Giver’s advice is sound; for now that I know who my father was, why he was there and how he came, who the Condor people were and what they were doing, now that I am learned in such matters, it is my old ignorance, in itself valueless, that is valuable, useful, and powerful. We have to learn what we can, but remain mindful that our knowledge not close the circle, closing out the void, so that we forget that what we do not know remains boundless, without limit or bottom, and that what we know may have to share the quality of being known with what denies it.

Le Guin, Always Coming Home, page 29

I think, perhaps, that one of the ways in which we live now—purportedly, with all the world’s knowledge at our fingertips—is the kind of forgetting that Stone Telling warns against here, a closing of the circle. As that knowledge becomes harder to grasp, as the systems which have made so much knowledge possible turn upon themselves and eat themselves from the inside-out, what might we be able to remember?