Knowledge is wonderful, but wonderment is better. If the thirst for a bit of knowledge is slaked in an instant, the fact tends not to stick. The next time I see it, I will have to look it up again. For one thing, five minutes after I have looked up the name of a flower, or whatever, I have usually forgotten it. It used to feel marvellous to live in an age of such easy access to facts, but now I am not so sure. As night falls, I will remain there, absorbed by my star-identification app. I will just stand there, checking, identifying, reading, paralysed by my own curiosity. ![]() Much more of this and I will grind to a halt completely. Or I would stop to point the camera at a plant, or at a songbird, or – dear God – at a bloody pebble. Every other minute, I would glance at the sky or the sea – and then at my phone. This madness has to stop.Īn image of myself walking on an idyllic coastal path came to mind. Can’t say I had ever wondered, but now you mention it … I clicked to download, but stalled just in time. Show it a pebble and it will tell you what kind of stone it is. On my Twitter feed today, an advert popped up for – I kid you not – a stone-identifying app. Sweet.īut a straw has broken the camel’s back. No more wondering what that beautiful flower or tree is: take a pic and everything you want to know about it will be yours. Things got better and worse with the advent of nature apps. It had just left a city I had never heard of on the Yangtze for a port I had never heard of in Australia. Why, only the other night, just nodding off, I was pinged interesting tidings about the SSI Excellent, a bulk carrier registered in the Marshall Islands (deadweight: 81,119 tonnes) that I saw in the Bristol Channel last summer. ![]() The ship app goes one further – unbidden, it tells me where ships I once identified are now to be found. And that ship out there on the ocean blue, halfway to the horizon? Soon I didn’t have to wonder where it was off to, either.
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