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In "The Doubloon," a chapter in Moby Dick, several different characters each try to interpret the symbolic meaning of a gold coin stamped with the picture of a rooster, a volcano, and a tower. Each sees something of himself in the coin. Each projects his own personal interests onto the coin, until at last the crazy black boy, Pip, says the coin is the ship's belly-button, and he recounts the very old joke that if you unscrew your bellybutton, your buttocks will fall off. If we ever finally understood God's true and final meaning, suggests Melville, then the whole thing might just come to an end, Earth and heavens rolled up like a scroll. Better to leave it a mystery.

We humans, however, cannot stop picking at that scab. Ever since Adam ate the apple, we have sought after knowledge regardless of the risk. We look at people and wonder about them; we watch the news and ask what is really going on; we suspect that there is something between the lines behind the text. We notice patterns of behavior and think "aha!" Why does Julie always date men who drink too much? One of the tricks of writing college papers is learning to look at our own everyday behavior as if investigating the outlandish customs of some South Sea island tribe. Like Fox Mulder and Captain Ahab, we insist that the Truth is out there and we cannot rest until we have grasped it, no matter what the cost. What makes us tick, we want to know, and that very wanting is the ticking we would know about. It is the I wanting to look itself in the I but never being able to stand outside of itself to see itself directly. And so we endlessly chase our tails looking for clues to the meaning of it all. The patterns may be within any one text or between several texts, or between texts and television, or texts and politics, or texts and biology or computer science. Such patterns reveal something and thus raise questions that make excellent paper topics.

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