One never gets to the bottom of what can be known when studying the Civil War! It is truly one of those bottomless experiences of life! Every time you open a door and learn something, you find yourself in another hallway with another six or eight doors to be explored.
I suppose that, unlike the infinity of the universe, there is a logical bottom to the Civil War, though it is too vast to be fully known. An additional conundrum is the frustration of dead ends where a piece of valuable information is simply lost to history.
This “bottomless” nature of the research is not dissimilar to my own field of academic background. With a master’s and doctorate in theology and ministries, the effort to understand Scripture, theology, and Christian history has much the same multifaceted scope.
The Bible is written largely in Hebrew (Old Testament) and Greek (New Testament). But to really understand these languages, one needs an understanding of similar cognate languages in the Semitic and Indo-European linguistic families. Before I began the study of Hebrew, though I had heard of Aramaic and Arabic, I did not even know there were other cognates called Ugaritic and Akkadian!
There exists a true principle of life: The more you know, the more you know that you don’t know!
The smartest guy of all time – Solomon – spoke of the frustration that actually attends extensive learning … “For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.” ( 1:18)
Randy Buchman
Enfilading Lines 