That's one of those meaningless and unanswerable questions the mind keeps returning to endlessly, like the tongue exploring a broken tooth.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the nature of thought and the tendency of the mind to dwell on unresolved questions.
Arthur C. Clarke compares the relentless nature of human thought to a tongue repetitively probing a broken tooth, illustrating how we often fixate on questions or ideas that are ultimately beyond our understanding. This metaphor highlights the futility of searching for answers to certain questions while simultaneously acknowledging the deep-seated curiosity that drives this mental exploration.
In practice
In a discussion about life's mysteries, one might say, 'As Clarke said, that's one of those meaningless and unanswerable questions the mind keeps returning to endlessly.'
Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.
In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favour of the facts as they are.
Superstitions, bigotries, hypocrisies, prejudices, these phantoms, phantoms though they be, cling to life; they have teeth and nails in their shadowy substance, and we must grapple with them individually and make war on them without truce; for it is one of humanity's inevitabilities to be condemned to eternal struggle with phantoms.
For John was running, and this was terrible. Because if you ran, time ran. You yelled and screamed and raced and rolled and tumbled and all of a sudden the sun was gone and the whistle was blowing and you were on your long way home to supper. When you weren't looking, the sun got around behind you! The only way to keep things slow was to watch everything and do nothing! You could stretch a day to three days, sure, just by watching!
A low capacity for getting along with those near us often goes hand in hand with a high receptivity to the idea of the brotherhood of men.
Now, at times this issue has tended to degenerate into an 'either-or' type of debate. Either we protect our people from terror or we protect our most cherished principles. But that is a false choice. It asks too little of us and assumes too little about America.
Men and women were created for something great, for infinity. Nothing else will ever be enough.
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