I looked at Lettie in the moonlight. “Is that how it is for you?” I asked.
“Is what how it is for me?”
“Do you still know everything, all the time?”
She shook her head. She didn’t smile. She said, “Be boring, knowing everything. You have to give all that stuff up if you’re going to muck about here.”
“So you used to know everything?”
She winkled her nose. “Everybody did. I told you. It’s nothing special, knowing how things work. And you really do have to give it all up if you want to play.”
-Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
***
There’s a version of this thought around consciousness and recursion, because of course the universe can only be infinitely varied and wonderful if it is not a simple, recursive system. But if we take Douglas Hofstadter’s thesis seriously, all consciousness derives from recursive properties — the system knows itself only when it is limited, retraces its steps. Ergo, the lovely possible mysterious universe is ultimately constrained by our sheer ability to apprehend it.