"Oh, that. It's all trivial—your grouse, my hermit, Bernard's Byron. Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife., Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final,"
(Act II.7)
says Hannah in Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia on living. That no matter what the outcome is, it is the hunting and searching and learning and living that make our lives important. It is not to wait until the other side because we'll find out all anyway.
She is also commenting on the chaos theory; that there really is no chaos at all because it is all self-contained and will infinitely increase in disorder until it explodes and is back to where it started and begin the chaos process all over again. In our own way we are finding out the same things others before us have found out. However likely it is that the thing has already been realized, brilliant moments and epiphanies are worth searching for.
It is noted in my copy that "Arcadia is a mountainous region of central Peloponnese, Greece; scene of idealized and idyllic country life in the pastoral poetry of ancient Greece, notably that of Theocritus, and Italy, notably that of Virgil; its shepherds are called 'Arcades'" (The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Twentieth Century and After, 2753). Thus suggesting a sort of Eden for the location where 'finding out' is the focus.
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