What is reality? How might we know it, when it is so strange and when our own experience is subjective and finite?

These questions are central to the earliest known work of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh (c.1800BC).  The eponymous hero goes on a quest for eternal life and absolute knowledge. Yet, Gilgamesh is denied this prize, and offered another: to accept mortality and wild uncertainty. As a result, The Epic of Gilgamesh is not merely the first example of a quest narrative but also the first example of a quest narrative in which the hero fails to gain the prize he wanted, but is given another completely different prize and advised to be grateful anyway.

No one ever finds a single overarching answer; at least, it is unlikely that any answer - however beautiful and persuasive - will remain definitive for all eternity. How, practically, might we prove the eternal truth of anything we assert, except by becoming eternal and objective ourselves and hanging around forever? In Valis, Philip K Dick has his protagonist Horselover Fat write: ‘My reasoning is this: arrangement of parts of the Brain is a language. We are parts of the Brain; therefore we are language. Why, then, do we not know this? We do not even know what we are let alone what the outer reality is of which we are parts…’  Horselover Fat is generally regarded as insane, but ironically he is a lot less mad than those who dismiss him as a lunatic. He does not understand how a finite and linguistic perspective may encompass everything, even a reality which is entirely non-linguistic and potentially infinite. Yet his doctors tell him that the objective facts are that he is insane and they are sane, and language can express this indelible truth perfectly well, along with anything else they need language to express. Yet, as Jorge Luis Borges once said, is it really likely that the grunting of primates, lovely though it is, would correspond perfectly with the mystery and beauty of the universe?