“I didn’t know more, I knew less, so I didn’t know it couldn’t be done.

I grew up in an old Victorian house near downtown Los Angeles, the front part of which was a language school. In addition to running the school, my father and my mother between them, taught seven languages.

One day when I was about nine, I came home from school and peeked into my father’s office, which was just off the foyer. His office, like the rest of the house, had the warmth and coziness of Victorian homes.

The bottom half of the walls were paneled in wood; finely finished box beams graced the ceiling with aging elegance, and a wooden bookcase covered one wall.

A gas heater had long ago replaced the wood in the fireplace. He was seated behind his large wooden desk, his back to the window, the cat to one side sleeping on a stack of papers.

In front of him were his extra pair of glasses, and a number of glass lenses. I watched as he took a couple lenses and held them up to his eye. He added a third and did the same. He did this over and over again using different combinations of lenses.

Finally, he taped the short stack of lenses together around the edges with white bandage tape. With more tape, he fixed them to the frame of his extra pair of glasses. He put them on and looked around.

He reached out and removed a single pencil from a cup filled with pencils and returned it to the very same spot. He went to the bookcase, pulled out a book and put it back. He went to the kitchen, opened a cabinet, took out a glass and filled it with water from the tap.

Then he poured the water down the drain, dried the glass, and returned it to its place on the shelf. For the rest of the day he walked around the house with these odd glasses on his face. The next day he placed the assembled glasses in his briefcase, put on his eye patch, and left the house.

I had never known my father without glasses. A couple of years earlier he had started wearing an eye patch that he switched from eye to eye every few hours. I never knew exactly why, but I understood it had to do with his seeing double.

We had little money and no health insurance, so corrective surgery wasn’t an option. The only solution, according to the doctors, was to wear a patch.

It was an imperfect solution because the loss of depth perception caused him to knock things over when he reached out, and stumble when he walked.

With all the things he had done in his life, my father was first and foremost a thinker. He thought about social justice, the origin of words, the evolution of music, and how the soul and subtleties of light and color could be reproduced on canvas and film.

Before World War II my father was a documentary filmmaker.

In Europe, before World War II he was a documentary filmmaker, which led to an interest in cameras and lenses. It was this that inspired him to seek his own solution to his double vision.

Certainly, there was a way of bending light that would allow him to see again.

From the taped-together stack of lenses my father put together that day in his office the optician was able to derive a formula to grind new lenses. After that, my father sported thick glasses, but he never wore a patch again.

Several years later, he was asked to speak at an ophthalmological conference where he explained to the assembled physicians what had inspired him to find his own solution to a problem he was told had no solution other than surgery.

Years later, I asked him how it was that he knew more than the doctors. His answer: “I didn’t know more, I knew less, so I didn’t know it couldn’t be done.”

The way the brain handles knowledge is a double-edged sword. On one hand, knowledge is the greatest tool we have for understanding the world in which we live. It makes up the raw material for everything we think, all our ideas, our decisions, our problem solving, and our creativity.

When it is fluid and ever-evolving, knowledge is exciting and inspiring and leaves us wanting more.

Yet, at some point, knowledge can do just the opposite. It becomes the very thing that keeps us from learning. The moment we say, “I know!”, curiosity and the very possibility of change disappear. Finally, we stop questioning and become willing subjects of the tyranny of knowledge.

My father used to say, “There is no problem that doesn’t have a solution if you’re willing to forget what you know and change the way you think.”