A Grand Scheme

If you're reading this, you must be a very faithful reader indeed, seeing that I haven't posted in just over two months. This is what happens when you become obsessed with inventing the perfect classification system. I didn't mean to abandon the blog. I neglected it for a few days once I became engrossed in my project, then pretty much forgot about it. Well, here we are again. There really isn't that much to fill you in on, except that I have developed some ideas of my own, and these ideas now seem a more interesting subject than my apprenticeship to Mr. Phillips per se. At least they are interesting to me, but I don't know how much of that is due to my obsession. But hey, it's my blog, so I can write about whatever I want, and nobody's making you read it, right?

For now I will just record this thought: Classifying things, I've come to realize, is more than just a way to attach labels to them. It's a way of understanding, or at least attempting to understand, what things are, and how different things relate to each other. In other words, it's sort of like a philosophical system, or at any rate it's an expression of a philosophical system. A classification system attempts to determine not only what a thing is, but also its place in the scheme of things. Although it may seem an arcane art, I think the reason classification has become so fascinating to me is that it makes everything in the universe, from the biggest to the smallest, to seem interconnected, all things part of one grand design. The classification system is merely a human attempt to interpret and describe that grand design, to embody it as faithfully as possible. And I've realized, too, that's why I fundamentally disagree with Mr. Phillips. I believe there is some grand structure, a scheme of things, whereas he seems to think either that there isn't, or that we can't know it, and that a classification scheme is just an artistic creation, like a symphony or a cathedral. I see it as more like a science, or at least a philosophy... in either case, it's a sincere attempt to arrive at the truth, which is to say the way things are. And the wondrous thing to me is that reality, in some mysterious way, seems to be something like a symphony or cathedral itself. Maybe it is quixotic to attempt to find out the outlines of this grand design, but to me that is the challenge and the allure of this project. Not that I believe that every little thing can be assigned a specific place in the scheme, by myself or any other mortal... but the belief that it does have a place in the overall structure, whether we can understand it or not--that it can be located somewhere in the grand scheme of things--this is what animates and underlies my quest.