Alexander Pope advises that we drink deep of the Pierian spring, for a little learning is a dangerous thing. A little knowledge, like a little learning, is indeed a dangerous thing except in the case of persons, where a lot of knowledge endangers love, respect, and admiration. Propinquity breeds familiarity, and familiarity contempt. Distance preserves and augments what propinquity diminishes. In matters sartorial this holds as well, as witness the robes of the judge which add an aura of dignity and majesty to a poor mortal who, under the aspect of eternity, and under the distancing attire, is as wretched as the man in the dock.
Category: Aphorisms and Observations
The Sentimentalist
The sentimentalist clings to his petty coins of memory, playing the miser, loathe to make donation of them to oblivion; all the while mocking himself from the heights of a magnanimity which is as much his as his pettiness.
Contention Got You Down?
Two observations to buck you up:
No abrasion, no pearl.
No pressure, no diamonds.
Polemics
It cannot be avoided in politics, but must be avoided in philosophy.
Leonine Wisdom
The wise lion sometimes plays the chicken.
The Erasure of History
The Left's assault on collective memory via the redacting and outright erasure of the historical record is quite convenient for them: it ensures that the memory of its iniquities will be kept hidden.
Abrasion and the Pearl
It is by (dialectical) abrasion that the pearl (of wisdom) is formed.
Atheists and Immaculate Conception
Atheists accept it too, except that they, like Richard Dawkins in a different but related connection, take it further: they hold that all are born free of Original Sin.
Defense Mechanisms as Psychic Calluses
Some defense mechanisms are in aid of mental health and adaptation to life. They are distortions of personality, but beneficial, like calluses. To modify the metaphor, in a warped world, the warpage of which is Original, the timber of humanity is correspondingly crooked and knotty, but more resilient in consequence.
Self-Love and Self-Respect
Self-love can extend to love of the smell of one's own excrement, at which point self-respect raises an eyebrow. But are we not just clever land mammals? How is self-respect possible for such critters? It is actual, so it is possible.
Left-Wing McCarthyism
Contemporary 'liberals' hunt for 'racists' the way MCarthyites in the 1950s hunted for Communists. Same way, different witches.
The Peninsular Man
No man is an island. He can't be. Ought he be a continent? No.
The healthy man is a peninsula. He is connected to the mainland, and nourished by that connection, but he doesn't allow himself to be influenced from all sides. A part of him juts into the oceanic.
The peninsular life is best.
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A long-time reader responds (30 November 2018):
So I read your post just now a) at the outer extremity of a literal peninsula; b) linked to my life-partner only by the narrow isthmus of the telephone; c) suddenly disconnected from the quotidian working world by my recent layoff; d) having spent the last decade or two immersing myself in old books and questioning all that I thought I knew; and e) generally projecting myself further and further outward from the presentist mass-society craton into the "oceanic" of the past, the unknowable future, and the great mystery of creation and human awareness.
In other words: peninsular.
Many are the pleasures of blog. One is the pleasure of giving food for thought. Another is the pleasure of receiving appreciation.
Homo Loquax
You know the type. The one whose lack of understanding of a subject is no barrier to his talking about it.
The Human Predicament
Part of what makes the human condition a predicament is dispute over whether it is a predicament and whether, if it is, it has a solution, and if it does, what it is. This is just what one would expect if our condition is indeed a predicament.
In the Dark
They dispute whether we are in the dark and whether, if we are, there is away to the light, and if there is, what it is. All of which goes to show that we are — in the dark.