01

To begin at the beginning: I am not as smart as think I am. Which is to say, somewhere along the line I became convinced not only that I am smart, but that I ought to be a genius. This is a bad position to begin from if you ever hope to figure out what is true. Trying to be a genius, you only figure out what is clever, and while that cleverness may contain some measure of truth, it’s rarely all that much.

02

So what is cleverness? Cleverness is performance and vanity, rhetroic and design without substance, or worse, which hides some insidious ulterior motive. Demonstrating intellectual prowess through a well-timed quip, a gorgeously phrased postulation, is spinning in verbal circles like a dancer on a stage. Like dancing, there is no harm in playing with words and ideas, creating aesthetically pleasing grammatical structures; but there is a time for dancing and there is a time for running, and a time for stolid plodding.

03

I don’t know that knowledge, philosophy, and the search for truth are better pursued through plodding than dancing. I doubt that they need be either one of these things individually—in fact, it is perhaps best to begin with the assumption that it will be any and all and everything besides, at one time or another. To get stuck in cleverness, as to get stuck in stolidness, will inevitably lead to me forcing whatever truth I happen to find into some form other than what it is. Which would rather defeat the point of the endeavour.

04

So, then, proceed in the expectation that all expectations will be confounded, and in the understanding when I want things to take some particular form, I am simply creating my own disappointment and frustration. The impulse to quibble over minutiae is the desire to make what exists other than what it is. Doing so changes the True Thing only superficially, and succeeds only in deceiving myself and others for the sake of my own pride, or vanity, or fear of facing a truth which frightens or displeases me.