The Wisdom of Kerbochaurd-Second Installation

I apologize for missing last week, I was away from a computer over the weekend. It is now Saturday again, and we turn our eyes to the inspired work of Mr.L'amour.
Today's topic: WISDOM!

What kind of scholar was I? Or was I a scholar at all? My ignorance was enormous. Beside it my knowledge was nothing. My hunger for learning, not so much to improve my lot as to understand my world, had led me to study and to thought. Reading without thinking is as nothing, for a book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think.
"A good question...but I am merely a seeker after knowledge, taking the world for my province, for it seems all knowledge is interrelated, and each science is dependent to some extent on the others. We study the stars that we may know more about our earth, andherbs that we may know medicine better."
"You are a physician?"
"A little of one. So far I have had more experience in the giving of wounds than the healing of them."

I put the last bit in just because Mathurin is funny and he is certainly not exxagerating. The man loves to fight. I really like this passage because there are so many great ideas in it. First of all, there is some truth in the idea that admitting ignorance is the beginning of wisdom. Those people who think they are wise are usually not the ones you want to be listening to. There is a humility in recognizing the gaps of knowledge and a strength in pursuing the filling of them. "A seeker after knowledge"...I wish we were all such.
Then there is the idea that all forms of knowledge are related, which is becoming more and more apparent to me. I was recently thinking that if someone were to ask me what my specialty in history was, I would want to say "world history", which isn't really an answer, but no country has developed...no story has come to be that was not in some way connected to another story. We say that this is the age of Globalization, but Globalization is simply the recognition of what has always been the case. The degree of connection has changed, but not the state.

For example, when the colonists from Western Europe arrived in the Pacific Northwest, they traded nails with the Native Americans who only knew of iron because Japanese ships had been blown far off course and wrecked on the Natives' soil. And the Japanese ships wrecked because they would designed not to go too far from Japanese shores and therefore had no rudder. This happened because Japan was locked down at the time because they saw Europe as a threat and wanted nothing to do with them...except for the Dutch, who were allowed to come into a few select ports.
So it is all connected and has been for centuries. Likewise, philosophically speaking, things are linked in various forms and ways. Political theory is tied up in moral and ethical issues, which at times are connected to scientific quesions (human life, cruel and unusual treatment, etc) and of course, all of those are filtered through cultural lenses which leads to socio-anthropology and questions of social structures...this could go in circles and of course this line isn't linear. A great tangled mess really, and college students everywhere tear their hair out trying to grasp the elusive "big picture".
But even just *attempting* to make these connections, to see the lines that are there and try to see how things all fit together is a worthy endeavor, and I think makes us better students and better people.

Thoughts from you?