Jeremy D. Adler, Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Fellow in the Department of German, King’s College London, will read from his acclaimed work, “The Electric Alphabet: Notes Towards A Dictionary Of The Universe” (Writers' Forum, 1986).
"Knowledge is a blank sheet of paper covered with illegible handwriting for the amusement of successive generations. Its characters are essentially inane, but when the code has been cracked, the facts may become true, or even boring. A passive observer bombards an encyclopaedia with sub-atomic particles, visible in the mind as a cloudy bubble-chamber with a series of parabolic traces which represent what might, perhaps, under particular and unrepeatable circumstances, once have possibly been the case. This we call certainty. Cynics have therefore been known to assert that true knowledge is identical with irony, which is the act of metaphysical murder produced by a mind subtracted from God. Generally speaking, however, knowledge is considered a reasonable harmless form of incompetence."