There’s an interesting article today by Peggy Orenstein in the NY Times Magazine about the potential hindrances created by an unending hunger/search for knowledge, and how the Internet’s “always at your fingertips” access to the same can result, not in more wisdom and understanding, but in less.
In the article she draws what I think is a very interesting relationship between the Internet and the Sirens in James Joyce’s Ulysses:
I think there’s something deeper going on as well. Those mythical bird-women (look it up) didn’t seduce with beauty or carnality — not with petty diversions — but with the promise of unending knowledge. “Over all the generous earth we know everything that happens,†they crooned to passing ships, vowing that any sailor who heeded their voices would emerge a “wiser man.†That is precisely the draw of the Internet.
Orenstein makes an interesting point and offers up her own struggle to overcome the potentially endless draw of “everything you ever wanted to know” as an object lesson.
I hear these same Sirens daily, and I too struggle to lash myself to the mast.