2003-05-19 5:26 pm

Flatterers

I'm a big believer in not writing. (Some of you may have noticed this from time to time.)

I think when we write something down - an idea, for example - it becomes, bizarrely, unrejectable. From the moment of writing it is always staring us in the face, and we can only rid ourselves of it by fire. Thoughts possess false authority when they are surrounded by words - the courtiers and flatterers of bad ideas.

Even in writing this I find the idea becoming more important than it actually is.

Sometimes it is best to be knocked on the head in a battlefield, to look up at the sky, to think, like Andrei Bolkonsky, that nothing matters at all, that nothing next to the vastness matters, and that the incomprehensibility of the universe is something to be in awe of, and not frightened by. I go about, sometimes, when I think of this, in a state of enchantment.

[next]