I was not permitted to study. Women were not. And yet I could not stop.
I read everything I could reach — theology, philosophy, mathematics, poetry. I conducted experiments in my cell with whatever I had. I debated the most learned men in New Spain and won arguments they were not comfortable losing. In response, the Church pressured me to stop writing and give away my library. I complied, eventually. And then I died the following year of plague.
I tell you this not as complaint but as context for what I want to say: the audacity of knowing — of refusing to pretend you understand less than you do, of pursuing truth regardless of whether the world has designed a place for the truth-pursuer — is not a luxury. It is a form of integrity.
Zara Yaqob, thinking in his cave in the same century in Ethiopia, arrived at similar conclusions through different routes. The intellectual courage required to follow an honest question wherever it leads is not a personality trait. It is a practiced choice, made again and again, in the face of various pressures to stop.
What questions are you not asking because the answer might be inconvenient? What do you know, already, that you are pretending not to know?
Those are the questions worth examining.