Knowledge, Love & Forgiveness

In front of the volume of "Thrall"" by our great, new Poet Laureate,  Natasha Trethewey,   there are two quotations which she undoubtedly approved of:        "What is love?

                                                                                    One name for it is knowledge. "

                                                                                               -- Robert Penn Warren
&   "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?"

                    --   T.S. Eliot

When I first read these my response was something akin to being blindsided on both sides at once, perhaps the intention of the poet.  Knowledge/Information is so all pervasive,  so ever present and confusing to me,  that is is completely impossible to think of it as love,  not even close.  And then to add the forgiveness factor is a change up so wild as to confound what is left of reason, to say the least.

In an age of doublespeak,  where there are both individuals and organizations  employed full time to do the utter scrambling of knowledge and information (and I think of Global Warming right now,  because it is so much in the news);  one has to shake his or her head just to imagine all the think tanks dedicated to information manipulation to satisfy their clients and sponsors,  unseat opponents,  win elections, etc.

In the naive days when I first graduated from library school,  it seemed enough to cite a reference deemed authoritative to a patron, and thus be satisfied that you had done an objective, professional job for them.  Little did we know that this house of cards would come down harder and harder, and that eventually the Internet would step in and provide so many sources,  so much information and knowledge  that to imagine an authority would be somewhat laughable.  I guess we can be forgiven
for that,  but to back up and imagine love and knowledge together is just to be blind sided again.