Lost Knowledge

Caroline Lin, 11L

I. The Great Big Book of Everything It was my grandmother who had taught me how to read. My father, always the practical man, never bothered to learn himself. Why read, he said, when nothing was ever written? It wasn't completely true, but he may as well have been right. Even before the Invasion that took away all our knowledge, reading had been made obsolete by the wonders of technology. It has been a hundred years since then, and the people of our ocean-locked island have had to learn to survive without technology. But some things remain the same. Reading is just as useless as it was before, only now we have crude paintings instead of holograms and town criers instead of companion AI. Everything my father needed to know he said was already in his head. He knew how to sow in the spring, water in the summer, and harvest in the fall. He had all that he needed to live a happy life. Reading would only empty you of yourself and fill you back up with useless things. My father would say this to me as he watched me carve letters into the dirt with my fingers, a disapproving furrow on his face. This would only grow larger as I grew older, and told him my wish to become a scholar. I was intent on proving him wrong. However, only one bookat least, it said it was a bookhad ever been found. It was in the ruins of the old town, inside the remains of an empty museum, perched on the stand of a display case. It was archaic, pages upon pages of fibrous papers bound together by a cracking spine. On its front was a proud declaration of its contents: The Great Big Book of Everything from A to Z. How lucky we were to have such an exhaustive resource! It was even covered in illustrations. Surely, out of all the books we could have found, this would be the most useful. I would show the other townspeople all that we'd forgotten. From this single artifact, we scholars could attempt to begin to unravel the secrets of the land. With great determination, we stumbled through each page. We painstakingly sounded out each of the letters, and glued them together to form words. We held arguments over not only the phonetics of new words, but their meanings as well. We dissected each of the diagrams, and compared them to that which we'd seen on our island. Through all our efforts, we've managed to translate nearly half the text, which begins as follows: A is for Aardvark. B is for Baseball. C is for Christmas... After twenty years of study, we have still not been able to determine what an aardvark is, nor the ritualistic importance of baseball in the old world. But I am certain that we will one day make a breakthrough. II. The Rediscovery of Evolution There lived an old woman on the outskirts of our town; she hid herself inside the ruins of her house. In her younger years, she had been a hero, championed by the farming techniques that she'd learned from her parents, who'd worked as botanists before the Invasion. But now, with her life flown past her and her brain rotting, she had slipped slowly into insanity. Every day she would sit on the same chair, surrounded by broken metal, defunct machines and missing memories. She would face the smashed windows and look out onto the grass, where she'd placed two rocks, side by side. My grandmother said that she was lost in the past. When my father heard this, he replied, What past? Because she'd taught many of the townspeople how to farm, they honored the old woman by bringing her nourishment every day. She would not have lived, otherwise. Once, when I was a child, my grandmother placed a basket of fresh greens in my hands and asked me to deliver them to the old woman. With great trepidation I took the greens and marched dutifully to the house at the edge of town. There I

saw her, crouched over those same two rocks that she now spends every waking moment watching. I gingerly cried out, Excuse me, Ma'am, before dropping the basket by her feet. This startled her. She looked up from the rocks towards me, shock registering on her face. Young boy! she cried, Young boy, I must tell you something! I must warn you! She pulled me closer to her and began in a frenzied whisper: Long before you were ever born, long before the Invasion, there was a man named Darwin. And he stole from the world a great secret, and he called it Evolution. And Darwin said, 'All living things come from a single ancestor, and all things change over time.' But this was a very bad thing that he did. Because when man found this out, he began to change. He began to evolve. And then he had evolved so much that he was no longer man at all, but something else altogether. I had, like all the others, forgotten about what Darwin said. But a year ago I had a dream, and I remembered, young boy. And I began to seemy husband, my son, everyone, they were all evolving! Only I saw that they were not becoming more, but less. We were losing more and more of what we were. And I saw that we had all been stripped of our humanityand look! Just like that, my son turned into a monkey. Only he did not know how to be a monkey. The old woman pointed to the first rock. Then, soon after, my husband did the same, she said, as she pointed to the second. Listen, young boyif you are not careful, you will become just like them! I ran away from the old woman when she said that, though I could never run from her words. And to this daywhen I look at my father, I do not see a man, but a monkey. And I cannot help but wonder if I have become the same. III. The Meaning of Life As we scholars debated over the meaning of 'Zebra' in The Great Big Book of Everything for the fiftieth time, a bearded man came to the island in a wooden boat. This was a most miraculous feat, because although many of our own had tried to sail away from the island, no one had ever come to our shores. He was the first foreigner we had ever housed in all our hundred years as a town. The news spread quickly amongst the townspeople, reaching us within hours of his arrival. So, eagerly, we rushed to the foreigner, anxious to trade knowledge, and learn of the outside world (if there really were any at all). We brought with us our tome of study, and found him still sitting in his boat, which had been dragged onto the shore, and surrounded by a group of curious townsfolk. He wore clothing faded by the sun, and most surprisingly, held what appeared to be a leather book in his hands. What is that book you carry? we asked him. What do you know? He lazily peered at the group of us through the corner of his eye and replied, I know the meaning of life, Sirs. He then opened the book and flipped through the pages. It's all right here. And the book was empty.

I wrested the book from the foriegner's hands. What is the meaning of this? I demanded. All our lives we went around in circles, trying to find meaning where there was none. Then, one day, I had an idea. I took the book o