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What Do Groucho Marx and Jesus Have in Common?
Words may be limited, but your capacity to know is infinite
Here’s one of the great paradoxes of life: One of the most revered sages of all time, Lao Tzu, in his timeless book, the Tao Te Ching, wrote, “Those that know do not speak. Those that speak do not know.”
That powerful 12–word sentence has been quoted countless times by countless people for more than 2,500 years. And yet (drum roll, please), the extraordinary Mr. Tzu, ended up using words to convey the truth that cannot be spoken. D’oh!
So… I guess it can be said that either Lao Tzu didn’t know what he was talking about (because he was talking)… or he did know (and was doing his best to communicate an infinite truth with finite words). Or perhaps neither. Or perhaps both. Or perhaps neither and both.
In any case, in the spirit of divine conundrums, the following poem is offered in gratitude to Lao Tzu, Noah Webster, Marcel Marceau, Groucho Marx, Jesus, you, and Nobel-Prize winning physicist, Niels Bohr, who once proclaimed, “Now that we have met with paradox, we have some hope of making progress.”
And with that, my friends, on with the show (and tell):
Excerpted from Full Moon at Sunrise
