More wisdom from unexpected sources.

My morning's couplet, taken from today's junk e-mail:

Knowledge is solving problems no one else can:
quit your deadened job, make more money.

Of course the second line actually said "deadend," but my linguistically hyperactive brain automatically fit another vowel in there, in keeping with Beloved, through which I'm swimming once again, with yet another lively brood clamoring behind me. I'm not so into this particular version of a found-text experiment to make a whole poem out of these things. But I do like these two together, and I like the strange, mystified agency of "knowledge," which makes me think of knowledge running about with a little toolkit, fixing problematic toilets and lightbulbs and solving difficult derivatives and functions and perhaps even doing a little bit of close reading and dictionary legwork. It's the kind of statement that sounds aphoristic and possibly even true, until one starts to poke at it a little more. Is that an actual definition of knowledge? What if knowledge is actually recognizing which problems are insoluble? Or knowing how to help other people solve the problems? Or what if knowledge really is as independent as this sentence's literal level of meaning makes it out to be: a free-floating force that one might harness temporarily but must always lose control of almost immediately?

And the afternoon's junk mail declaration: No one is told off.