History and science, math and fiction, music and art, all information, really, is like a string of inconceivably long characters and ideas and sensations with no end in sight and no discernible pattern. While working to accumulate knowledge, it may just so happen that a body of work grows big enough to contain everything that is, was, and could be, such that nothing that can be included in the set will add anything new that wasn’t already there. Once that string achieves this state and becomes complete, it merely repeats and rephrases and retells the same things over and over again, without saying anything new, in bits and snippets of truth, that are rearranged and permuted in different forms, until any and all further additions only make it harder to search the catalogue for one specific idea due to the immensity of the work involved in searching the corpus and assigning preference and value to its elements. Any redundancy in elements or topics only serves to show the creators’ focus and level of interest in various subjects and ideas, and what contributors feel is worth expressing. Studying what’s repeated and what’s left out can reveal both the obsessions of a culture and what it disregards. When the gathering process comes to a conclusion, it might be preferable to stop saving and recording every scrap and detail, stop pushing for more contributions and payloads, and try to take a step back to analyze and interpret what’s already there in it’s complete form in order to remove all redundancies and appreciate the knowledge in it’s singular and stripped-down form, like a dictionary, while keeping the rephrasings in place in order to provide novelty and comparison of expression, like a thesaurus. There’s no sense in retelling the same story over and over again once everyone has heard it, as the lessons have been experienced and learned. There’s also no sense in denying a voice from speaking truth in its own words, as we all know that time will often take from us those who have mastered the lessons of life and so they must pass on their knowledge and move aside to make room for their successors.
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