solutions

Responses to stubborn social ills must generally neither be actual solutions, which are too severe on the human environment within which these ills live, nor be surrenders, which make ills too severe and increase their multiplication.

truth and good are not allied

That is the lesson of the sons of Noah and their drunken father's nakedness.

conquers all

Love, like a dog licking a bone, wears away anything hard, whether truth, prejudice, or otherwise. A slow but complete acid, indiscriminate: nonmoral.

disbursement

The buttresses of the walls we build between ourselves and the void press inward. We are not keeping the emptiness out, but holding ourselves in.

chaining desires

Our desires are the source and vary, including in this way: a few desires can link with their kin into chains and structures. The rest are in the main inert, simple, impossible, or destructive in a lower sense. Morally seen, that hoarde of simple desires subsist in a narrow band between pleasures and hazards: birdsong and rusty nails.

But those chaining desires -- these can develop into good and evil. Morality is predictive appreciation of the potential and produce not of all human desires, but of that residue of our desires which can be spun into webs. Not that I want coffee, but that I want to talk to you.

humility ready to ride

Not humility but pride in me drives quiet inaction. In quiet unrelation vaunting self-regard evades real limits, real faults that glare in speech or action. By not writing, I keep safe a high view of my ability to write. Humility may not spur me to act, but can ride happily when other spurs motivate.

humble yourself

Tend your plot, keep silence. Yes, surely, but why?

The trouble and the drive

The trouble is conviction: that there is nothing to say that needs saying, no reason to multiply words; that there is vanity in uninvited speaking. But there is a quiet drive to talk, too: a suspicion that one is alive not in the depths of one's inward thoughts, but at the surface, in the interaction, through communion.