Limits

“The first thing a principle does is to kill somebody,” said Lord Peter Whimsey, the aristocrat-detective, the invention of Dorothy L. Sayers, speaking in one of her best novels, Gaudy Nights. Confessing my own limitations, I am here bound to report another Whimsey quote, in the same book (both courtesy of Wikiquotes, although I did read Gaudy Nights). There Whimsey said, “The facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.” To which I might add, by way of excuse, that if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Witty things always occur to me hours after the occasion for using them is past. Thus I better quickly marshal another quote to set the stage here, that by the most famous French diplomat ever, Charles-Maurice Talleyrand, who said: “Above all, no zeal.”—Which reminds me that he had the bad fortune to live with an even greater man always around, Napoleon. Napoleon once supposedly said to Talleyrand (and this sort of thing does build humility): “Look, you’re shit in a silk stocking.” I suppose I should render that more politely in French: “Ah, tenez, vous êtes de la merde dans un bas de soie.” Which reminds me of something else—of reading certain books in youth—I remember especially A Thousand and One Nights—in which, back in those days, the sexually explicit passages would be rendered in Italian! Groan! How that used to bug me. And my parents, speaking Hungarian, would switch to German when they didn’t wish us to understand what they were saying. But I’m now really wandering from the subject. Let’s get back to boredom.

Here I simply wish to emphasize that if the faculties of Man are single—expressing themselves in multiple modalities, each of those modalities has a boundary or limit. We benefit from them only when they are used in harmony. This is best illustrated with the intellect, the chief limit of which is also its greatest power. It can delimit any aspect of reality by separating it into a concept. This greatly increases our power of understanding, but only up to a limit. Hence Whimsey is correct. Principles, which are concepts dressed as absolutes, will kill people if other modes of perception are not permitted to come to bear. Hence also Talleyrand was nothing if not wise when counseling that zeal must be avoided. By curbing zeal, we give our other modes of being scope to enlarge our sense of the reality or action we are pondering.

One of the maddening but, in the long haul, most beneficial experiences we can gain by patrolling the border zone is that absolute certainties are unachievable. Wisdom is one of those great values that simply don’t lend themselves to exploitation. You can’t beat someone over the head with it, you can’t reduce it to a slogan, you can’t turn wisdom into money, power, or fame. If fame comes, it comes after you’ve departed. Conversely, any wisdom offered for sale or as the sure thing, you can’t miss, is certain to be counterfeit. Quotes are on my mind today, so let me end with one. Wisdom? Well….

So high, you can’t get over it.
So low, you can’t get under it.
So wide, you can’t get around it.
You gotta come in by the door.