I'm Maggie Smith, and this is the slowdown.

Right this moment, so much is knowable.

You can Google almost anything or just ask Alexa.

I hear my kids doing that sometimes.

Alexa, what's the Spanish word for catastrophe?

What time is it in Australia? Who sings Funky Town?

Between our phones and our other devices, we have almost any fact at our fingertips, instantly.

When I was a kid, my parents' friend Mark was basically their Alexa.

This was pre-internet, so if they wanted to know something, who was the guy in that movie?

What's the name of that Van Morrison song? They would pick up the phone and call Mark's house.

The phones back then were all landlines, mind you, because this was the 1980s. If someone wasn't home,

you just couldn't reach them. If my parents were lucky, Mark would be there, and because he was a master of trivia,

he'd probably have an answer to their question.

Of course, there wasn't a quick way of fact-checking him.

They had to trust him, or they had to be reminded of something they already knew but couldn't access him. They had to trust him, or they had to be reminded of something they already knew,

but couldn't access, a movie title, a song lyric, the name of an old classmate or neighbor.

So much is knowable, but then there's everything else.

Human experience is slippery.

Not everything has an easy answer.

This is where poetry really shines and really comes in handy.

If you want a factoid, go to the internet, or call Mark. If you want a different kind of truth, go to poems. Poetry doesn't make our experience less slippery,

but I think it helps us get a kind of grip on it.

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