The Experience of Clarity

461 The ancients taught their children: “Make your heart small.”  This age teaches them: “Be content with who you are.”  From shrinking the heart, we have progressed to stunting its growth.

462 We are the last of the discontented ... and hold this to be our highest virtue ... a discontentment which one cultivates.  That other thing, that whisper, “Accept yourself for who you are,” what is that but the formaldehyde of the public clinic?  ... where every germ has been sterilized ... even that germ of life, discontent, has been sponged away by the hairless hands of our public guardians.

463 Vanity is a means of progress; it is related to our future.  It does not show me who I am, but inflates an image of myself, and reality floats it away from me.  I feel the loss and would take it back.  I follow.

464 How does one go about convincing the vain of their vanity?  And then, if successful, how does one convince these newly defeated and humbled creatures that they need this vanity after all ... only to a greater degree?

465 My humility : Finding the soft spot to pound hard.

Most humans cannot tease an argument out of a widely held custom or resist a distinguishing taste which “proves” their elite status.   Most cannot see the difference between an argument as a stimulus and the argument itself. We are even so vulnerable to matching our affinities and aversions with our fellows that, when our logic parts ways, we often must call up a Faith in our most solid acts of deduction.   It is a silly moment, but then again, lapsing back into crowd-think does not feel silly at all – and that is a frightening thought.

My anxiety is made up of a left and a right bracket, too often containing a blunder. On the left, stimuli is coming in faster than my mind can process or on the right, slower than boredom can endure. I often jump off a fast moving train, only because of the speed of information rushing past my window … and then speed up to leap onto a train … any train , just because it is moving and I was not ... now flashing, with increasing speed, more and more facts past my window to the point of anxiety again. If however I demanded that accuracy, and accuracy alone, determined my speed, my starts and stops, I would also at times have to endure that anxiety of going against my “nature” … or at other times, wondering whether or not I was merely seduced by a necessary stage of compatibility. The priority of my conclusion would exist at crucial moments, with its deep but quickly forgotten roots, as a straw of memory bending in the wind. This fear of leaving a solid deduction behind is compou...

Sanity is an invulnerable reflex of social conformity because a sustained exposure as such is unendurable. If an argument falls in the woods and there is no one there to hear it, does our refutation alone cure us of our nerve-racking incompatibility?