I am insane. No. No I am not. They declared me insane. But I am not. I was just curious. I loved knowledge, I loved having more and more of it. I wanted it all. But when I turned 25 I ran out of easy questions to answer. The answers others found became more vague and unsure. I could make my best guess based on my knowledge. But that wasn’t the same as knowing. It still had that nagging uncertainty. Like rodents nibbling on the books in my mental library. Incomplete. I wanted these creatures gone. My library must be perfect. All the books complete and neatly organized.
All the knowledge I spent my life gathering. The last thing I learned rendered them all irrelevant. They didn’t matter. From knowing how to tie your shoes to how to diffuse a bomb. Useless knowledge.
In my aspirations to know everything I had made some unusual contacts, learned things that would have revolutionized the world. Fantastic things, unbelievable things. But with more doors open there were more rooms to learn about. An endless corridor of doors, I began to open all of them.
I am an old man now. I have reached the end of the corridor, opened the last door. I have knowledge another human wouldn’t even comprehend, humanity wouldn’t for a long, long time. I had been excited. Fill in the last empty space in the last bookshelf. What knowledge would it contain?
I opened it to discover only one page. With absolute certainty, the last thing that could ever be known, should never be known. It taught me. Knowledge is a terrible, terrible burden. Five words that had rendered my entire life, the lives of everyone I knew, entirely pointless.
“The world is made up.”