Everyone knows the story of the Garden of Eden, with its tree of knowledge. This tree has been famous for its fruit, of which Adam and Eve ate and thus initiated the original sin, eternal damnation etc etc…
Even though fruit is a healthy and sweet-tasting snack it is not the only good thing to come out of trees. In fact the fruit is by its nature ephemeral and quickly devoured. Other parts of the tree, however, are significantly more perpetual.
Wood is a wonderful material. It is strong, yet light, durable, yet soft and warm. It is also malleable and formable to the human hand. Almost everything can be made from wood. Usually the bounds of imagination are a greater limit than the physical properties.
A tree can be made into wood which can be made into most things humans need and desire. In the same way knowledge can be made into thoughts which can be made into all analysis that humans need and desire (and, presumably, some analysis that humans neither need, nor desire).
While fruit can be picked from the living tree, making wood generally involves killing the tree. This might seem cruel but in fact most trees are able to sprout again from the stump. Tearing down the tree of knowledge can thus give room for new knowledge to grow. This teaches us not to be too sentimental about past certainties.
The ambition of this blog will be to saw, plane and sand the available knowledge into something more refined. Or, if not refined, then at least more processed. In this modern world in which we live, information is more easily obtained than ever. Despite this, or because of this, it seems harder than ever to actually make something useful out of this information.
Our main objective will be to make use of information. Often we will only collate the available information and present it to the readers. Other times we will sort it, interpret it and give our analysis of it. Sometimes, hopefully, we will also be able to present some original thinking based on knowledge already at hand. This is what we mean by making wood from Eden.