The Experience of Clarity

120 When one comes upon a stimulus which promotes confusion, do we stop to sort out the confusion?  If one takes a hallucinogen and if this drug presents the user with a problem, does one then feel obligated to take the drug again tomorrow, in order to solve that problem?  Perhaps.  But if one has made the attempt day after day, and if one is so lucky as to have a few sober moments, ought one not to conclude, after so many failures, that the problem itself is a hallucination?  ... the solution being to abstain from the drug?  ... my case against seeking solutions to book-induced problems. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

121 Much of the great literature in the world seems to be merely a compensation for the author having failed in some ambition ... a lifelong attempt to justify oneself, “I’m better off this way.” A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

122 To think without writing: to face the same mountain of ice every day ... simply because I will not use ropes. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

123 Waiting for thoughts to leap out and letting the idea govern its own length, leaves one with a clean conscience ... as opposed to writing a long, calculated essay, where point after point must be compromised in order to fit into a logical whole.  No cartographer, after exhausting available time with the city streets, would then take this limited experience and ‘leap’ up into a mathematical conclusion of how the streets and buildings should be unified according to a demand for geometric precision.  What should we have learned two thousand years ago?  That the gulf between who I am and who I imagine myself to be is as wide as the gulf between a collage of observations and a reconciled system. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism