The instability of human knowledge
Is one of our few certainties.
Almost everything we know
We know incompletely at best.
And almost nothing we are told
Remains the same
when retold.
Found in «Strangers in Paradise: How Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas got to Heaven» by Janet Malcolm in the 13 November issue of The New Yorker.
Janet Malcolm’s article also provided the Gertrude Stein quote, posted just before this one.
Do you think Malcolm was thinking of Mies' beinahe nichts when she wrote the almost nothing line? Well, okay, maybe not: but she made me think of him. And she made me think of a hundred other stories told to me by the storytellers -- some of them related to me by birth or proximity -- who have shaped my life through their mythologies, real and imagined.
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