Montaigne, and philosophers like him, sometimes place too much emphasis on self-knowledge. I lack the quotation because I've been reading the Apology for Raymond Sebond without, as I usually do, underlining favorite bits. (If I were to do that, the nearly the whole chapter would get marked up.) There's a specific passage in which he questions the value of knowing anything when, as is the case with most of us, we barely know ourselves. I'd contend that there's a pleasure in reveling in certain kinds of arcana, even if the risk is deviating into pedantry and self-obliviousness. Best of all, for sheer entertainment value, is knowledge about the natural world. Here's a soliloquy from Redmond O'Hanlon's Trawler that furnishes an example:

"...that fish, a Roughhead grenadier, Macrourus berglax, is a Rattail, a member of the closely related family the Macrouridae--and they're deep-water fishes that live on the continental slopes and across the abyssal plains of all the oceans of the earth. Their armoured head, those heads of theirs, they're pitted with sense organs, and their eyes I tell you, in 1908 a German biologist, August Breauer--he worked out that the retina of a Rat-tail had around 20 million long slender rods in an area of one-sixteenth of a square-inch. And that, Redmond is around 225 times more than we have in our own eyes. Now, as you may know, the rods are for night-vision, so in dim light a Rat-tail may be able to see over 200 times as well as we can! And that's not all, because on the underside of most Rat-tails , but not ours, not this particular one, the Roughhead grenadier, there's an open gland in which they play host to luminous bacteria. Most of the time they leave their bacteria alone, waiting round the gland and they squeeze their bacteria, they annoy them--and the bacteria light up! And they've other special muscles too, like haddock--they've got really big swimbladders, the Rat-tails, and in the males, only in the males, they have these bizarre muscles set round the swimbladder. So it's obvious, isn't it? Their function must be entirely sexual. So imagine that! The males drum in the abyss--in the black night, the perpetual darkness, they drum up their females! And Redmond, it must be noisy down there, and full of the weirdest flashing lights, red and purples and blues, whatever--because I.G. Priede, Monty Priede, a hero of mine, at my own university, Aberdeen: he's estimated that for just two species of Rat-tails in the abyssal depths, Coryphaenoides armatus and yaquinae, at a population density of about 200 fish per square kilometer, you have a global biomass of around 150X10^6 tonnes. And that, Redmond, is just about the total world commercial fish catch!"