Penguin Classics is perhaps the most comprehensive collection of classic literature from around the world, spanning 4000 years and all continents. At the moment it stands at about 1200 books. An impressive number, but still the proverbial drop in the ocean when you consider all the books that have been written around the world throughout history up to this day.
Someone went to the trouble of adding up the number of pages of all Penguin Classics and calculated that, if you read 50 pages a day every single day, it would take you 27 years to read the whole lot. That's not going to happen, is it? So one has to be somewhat selective and accept the fact that there are many good books out there that we'll never read.
Quick digression. I assume that some people out there will buy a book, read it, and then buy the next one. That doesn't work for me. I'm a hoarder. I stockpile books and comics like an Arkansas redneck stockpiles food supplies in his underground shelter in anticipation of an imminent nuclear war and subsequent radioactive fallout. I can't help it.
The books that I've read so far are a fraction of the books that I own. (Often when people say "a fraction" they mean "a small fraction", but I simply mean "less than the total amount", anything between 1% and 99%.) And the books that I own are a fraction of the ones that I intend to buy. The books on my Amazon wish lists (yes, plural) just keep multiplying like bacteria in a Petri dish.
Anyway, given that the more you learn, the more you realize how much there is to learn, if we imagine knowledge as some sort of target to aim to, then the closer you think you're getting at it, the further away from you it gets. To use a food metaphor, it's like you're at a buffet, and while you're stuffing your face, they keep bringing new dishes. But also, paradoxically, the more you eat the hungrier you get.
All of that may seem frustrating, but it's actually rather exhilarating. If instead of a food metaphor we use a travel metaphor, once you realize that you'll never get where you want to go (for the simple reason that that place doesn't actually exist), that's when you start to enjoy the journey for its own sake, and you marvel at the infinite number different paths that you can take, each one of them filled with wonders.
In the words (slightly paraphrased) of the late Christopher Hitchens, "I want to live my life in the awareness that I don't know anything like enough yet, that I haven't understood enough, that I can't know enough, that I'm always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn't have it any other way."
