At dinner one night I was talking with my 10-year-old son, we must have been talking about myths, he’s been in a myth phase for a couple of years, Greek and Roman and Norse and Egyptian, and this must have led us to compare myths to contemporary religion, and then to science, and he said “science is like a logical myth,” which, I mean, come on, that’s pretty impressive, but then he said something so subtle and sophisticated that it almost made me gasp, it was like witnessing a comet. Oh! We were talking about how people throughout history have tried to make sense of the natural world, that’s what it was, and when he came to the Greeks and their myths, he was saying that the Greeks were trying to explain something they hadn’t yet found language for, and he said “It was like they knew without knowing.”

They knew without knowing.

!

That. Is. Profound.

The interwebs tell me that that line may have first been used in Plato, but I’m pretty sure that J. hasn’t been reading Plato. Maybe he came across it in a more obvious source–Adventure Time or Rick Riordan’s novels. Maybe it’s part of our collective unconscious, and at dinner one night it arose from the world’s reservoir of unspoken wisdom and arrived on his lips. I don’t know. But to hear him say it, this sweet, goofy boy who still needs a little assistance brushing his teeth . . . I don’t know. I don’t know.