William Fuller

An idea is sometimes sweetened by refusing to be expressed, if it attends, solicitously, to this failure, and urges us on to discover the true impediment to its adaptation. In that spirit, and bearing that intention within us, we note here, as elsewhere, there are generally three alternative courses. The first is simply to accept without question an explanation someone in our proximity, and whom we know, proffers and then elects to modify out of concern that small details are escaping to set up camp opposite what is being said. The second is to surrender one’s reluctance to withdraw from the presence of an unsolved problem by grabbing crudely at vacant affirmations that nothing further need be done, that everything to be accomplished was accomplished well before current advocates approached the threshold, coaxed forward by the desire to indulge their own vanity. The third is to remain absolutely uncommitted to any specific course, and to insist that the process begin anew each time, contending that no information will ever be adequate to the task of judgment, that the requirements, as they evolve, will make each element moot, or at a minimum place the likelihood of resolution in ever greater doubt over time, with the paradoxical effect that the impulse to continue is not thereby diminished, only channeled into a narrower, more determined form. Although no benefits are likely to accrue from this last course, it’s unquestionably the one most often followed, owing perhaps to people’s need to test the strength of a membrane designed to repel assault, or their perennial enchantment with kaleidoscopic complications spreading over the earth, as time walks through the sky.