Prince Yuri Dolgoruki

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Prince Yuri I Dolgoruki (c. 1099–15 May 1157) was the founder of Moscow and came from a 'princely' family, according to Wikipedia. I am not exactly sure what a 'princely' family might mean, but I assume it means royalty of one sort of another.

I probably ran into Yuri Dolgoruki during a period when I read 2-300 books about the Russian Revolution, but since I have a lousy memory for history, I really don't recall. What I do know is that I met Prince Yuri Dolgoruki as the name on the prow of a small ship that took a group of American tourists down the Volga River in 1968.

1968 -- the 50th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. It was a revolution in which those who ascended to power showed as much disdain for royalty as royalty might once have shown for them. Those who ascended to power held onto the Czar and his family for a while after the revolution, but in the end, shot them and dumped them down a well.

The revolution was not disposed towards royalty and yet there I was in 1968 -- the anniversary of that 'glorious' revolution -- riding down the Volga on a ship named after one of the lesser lights of royalty, Prince Yuri Dolgoruki. Maybe those inclined to call the revolution 'glorious' figured that it was OK to remember royalty as long as that royalty had been dead for a sufficiently long time.

But I don't know and probably will never know how, in a country that disdained royalty with a regal authority, someone nevertheless chose to name anything as prominent as a ship in honor of royalty.

I once asked Isaac Asimov, the prolific writer and scientist, what the greatest unknown was in the scientific world. He answered instantaneously, "The mind."

I guess that no matter how much you learn and no matter how expert you are in that learning, still, there will always be something that is unknown. Endlessly. And I guess that while it is nice to have learning, we all have to get used to it: There are things we will simply never know.

For this reason, although it's useful and perhaps pleasant to be as smart as we can, still, relying on those smarts in any assured way is pretty arrogant ... not to mention stupid.
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