At my age, as much as secrets and unknowns matter, there is also the matter of forgottens. I am interested in how often the matter of secrets comes up. It seems that individuals, groups, governments, bosses, employees, husbands, wives, teens are forever trying to keep certain things secret. Since knowledge, understandings and opinions are constantly changing, what was a secret worth keeping hidden can become out-of-date, obsolete, unimportant and no longer correct or relevant.
To make things more complicated, what is relevant depends on the subject in question, one's focus. Way deep down, many things are related, connected in some way. It might seem that my shoe size is not relevant to the question of what Shakespeare did and did not actually compose. However, in today's world, it is not just lawyers and philosophers who discuss, re-cast, toss around questions and subjects. We have large groups of students from high school through college and on into graduate school that are required to probe and experiment, argue and wonder,
test and conclude all sorts of questions and mysteries, from very old (thousands of years) to very new (the riots in Iran and the proposals and counter-proposals in legislatures and halls of debate everywhere).
I am interested in the matter of secrets people want to keep and how they work at keeping them. I am also interested in the armies of probers, thinkers, experimenters and evidence catalogers that we have at work today as opposed to the number of such there were active, say, 200 or 300 years ago. It is not just people and motivations, either. There are tools that change things today that did not exist a few decades back. Don't forget the amateur and professional writers and inquirers, the group we can roughly call "the media." As seekers of advanced degrees are, members of 'the media' also want to reveal, sensationalize, provoke and manipulate us to the right, to the left, to the center, etc.
