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I wish there was some moral or didactic quality to this work, for no other reason than to put a conventional wind to my sails, to stop a free-drift to literary oblivion; but like a typical atheist who, before his slaughter, will no doubt seek the aid of God, I too, despite contrary conviction, am forever destined to wordy, generally incoherent and long-winded canvasses of thought. James Majoros http://cavalcades.blogspot.com/
the wise man teaches himself and the fool teaches others, writes Chekhov. and he writes it for all of us to read, the joker.
ReplyDeletethe question is, who are these others whom the fool is teaching?
surely theyre not other fools. a fool only cares for its own teaching, and is after an audience. a fool has no time for a teaching of some other fool. so it has to be someone else, someone different, someone looking to learn.
someone wise.
so the wise man teaches himself, and the fool also teaches him.
Socrates exemplifies this. the wisest of the Greeks, yet he didn't know a damn thing. as if he really did study with some fool.
the problem is that these terms are too rigid for the fickle human nature. the wisest of the wise will slip up occasionally and start lecturing, and the stupidest fool will sometimes shut its mouth in wonder.
no man can hold any of these titles for long. neither is he as smart as some monkey would like to think, nor is he as stupid as some experts are suggesting. the reverse also holds: neither is a man as stupid as a monkey would imagine, nor is he as smart as some experts are saying. nor are the experts such experts, nor is a man a man, though his name may suggest it. only the monkey remains a monkey through and through.