I remember precisely when I had this particular epiphany. I was 12 years old, in love with books, and thanks to my parents who had signed a form, I had just gotten my first library card for the real (read: non-kiddie) section of the public library. Awed by the sheer number of tall bookshelves, intoxicated by the library smell and my newfound source of knowledge, I asked the librarian how many books they had, she said more than 100,000. I was duly impressed. But then I started thinking, and did some arithmetic on a piece of scrap paper.

And I realized that even if I read one book a day for the rest of my life, I would only be able to read a fraction of all the books on the shelves. Right there in the same room with me was provably unattainable knowledge. I could decide to read any book, but I could not read all of them. If I decided to read this book, then that other book would remain forever unread. Years before I would be able to put the words on it, I had stumbled upon a kind of incompleteness theorem, and I started to understand how small one's life actually is. This thought never left me.