You mean you never heard of that?

Some people would find it amazing to be nearly 47 years of age and still be discovering many things that others would regard as basic for an educated or civilized person. Not sure what it says about my education or civilization, but I continue to discover new stuff all the time. It's one of the things that keeps me going, I think.

The best example recently was this past fall, when doing the music for an old German silent film, "The Golem." In it, the reason for Germans to hate Jews is made mind-bendingly clear when someone points out how it was Jews who crucified Jesus, the "son of God," and that's why all Jews should be regarded as sub-human and worthy of extinction and so on.

A light bulb went off in my head, or over my head, if this was really a cartoon, which I sometimes suspect it is. So that's why the Nazis had it out for them! So that's why Wagner and so many others were fizzing with anti-Semitism all those years. I get it now!

Obvious to you, perhaps, but it was actually news to me. On my own, I just had never made the specific connection before, and no one had ever pointed it out to me. I guess I just assumed it was completely irrational hatred and bigotry, which itself more than sufficed as an explanation for me.

And so it was a pretty major gap in my understanding of people and the world that remained essentially unbridged until I encountered this obscure film. And the point of this is to point out that there are probably a lot of unfilled gaps that we all have and remain undetected, precisely because we DON'T know about them.

This condition seems dangerous in some ways, and might even be at the root of a lot of big misunderstandings—everything from the BP oil spill in the Gulf to the long-running conflicts in the Mideast. We all have little knowledge gaps (or actually BIG knowledge gaps) that prevent us from understanding each other and formulating widely accepted goals, etc.

So wouldn't it be great if there was some kind of medical or psychological procedure where you could have your mind and the accumulated knowledge and experience it contains be checked for gaps? Kind of like how you bring your car in and they hook its computer up to a machine that can tell what's wrong with it.

Anyway, the point of all this is to point out that I had another big gap experience come my way, this time in the form of G.K. Chesterton, the British author, critic, and so-called "Prince of Paradox." And it's a BIG gap, too, because he was 6-foot-4 and weighed something like 290 pounds. I encountered a reference to this guy in reading a review in the N.Y. Times of a small new book about Marshall "The Medium is the Message" MacLuhan" by Douglas Coupland, so I looked him up.

There's a lot to look up, and I'm amazed I never really heard of this guy before. I'm looking forward to exploring what he had to say. For now, though, let's just ponder something this "Prince of Paradox" wrote about, not surprisingly, the notion of Paradox.

To wit: "Paradox simply means a certain defiant joy which belongs to belief."

I like that, because as I go along I keep coming back to the idea that paradox, or at least the recognition of paradox, is one proof I can offer of the potential for human divinity of some sort: that we're not just a random species here on earth no different from dogs or dandelions. We can actually recognize when something transcends reality and triggers infinity, such as the sight of a gasoline tanker truck stuck on the side of the road because it has run out of fuel.

So G.K. Chesterton, wow. Makes you wonder how much else you don't know. Maybe that could be part of the gap check-up: to alert you somehow to how much you don't know. But that might be just too scary to contemplate.