I received one recently, a little hand-stapled book, only 20-pages long, with the intriguing title The Unknown Unknown – The delight of not getting what you wanted.

The premise is as curious as the title; it proposes there are really just three kinds of “knowing” in the world.

There are things we know that we know. Then there are known unknowns – that is, things we know we don’t know.

But there are also unknown unknowns – the things we don’t know we don’t know.

Maybe Socrates was right after all when he said, to know is to know that you know nothing.

Confused?

I was too. But on further musing, what seems like a philosopher’s riddle actually makes perfect sense.

For instance, I know that I know Elizabeth II is the monarch of Great Britain.

Just as I know that I don’t know the monarch of Belgium, even though I’m sure they have one.

I could google it of course and quickly make it a known known.

Here’s where it starts to get tricky.

Until today, I didn’t know that I didn’t know the monarch of the Faroe Islands, because I had no idea the place existed.

I didn’t know I had that gap in my knowledge. I didn’t know that I didn’t know.

The author of the little book goes on to relate the serendipitous discovery of unknown unknowns to shopping for books – those eureka moments when we pick up a book by an author we’ve never heard of, read a page or two, and are knocked off our feet.

But the real joy of the unknown unknown goes way beyond the chasing of “stuff”.

It turns the whole notion of desire on its head, reminding us that it’s not enough to always get what we know we want.

The best things are always those we never knew we wanted until we got them. Like a little book arriving in the mail, or the unexpected connection that leaves us looking at the world with new eyes.

Sometimes it’s just the simple pleasure of discovering a new fragment of knowledge.

For example, today I learnt that Shakespeare is the only author with his own Dewey decimal number – 822.33. It’s probably the first thing they learn in librarian school.

I discovered that stickers on fruit are completely edible, Thomas Edison was afraid of the dark, and there was once a metal band called Hatebeak whose lead singer was a parrot named Waldo.  

It’s reassuring to know there is too much for us to know in a single lifetime; that the unknown unknowns are queuing around every corner, or as Henry Miller once said, we live constantly at the edge of the miraculous.

I’m sure Queen Margrethe II would agree. She’s the monarch of the Faroe Islands.