Our courage mystifies us; our cowardice explains us.

Substrate

Consciousness is rooted not just in the flesh but in our lives. Substrate dependence is not about "carbon" vs. "silicon" but life in a sense that applies equally to biology and biography -- to conception, if you will, and to confession. Machines are capable of neither.

History depends, not on how passionately we resist, but on how precisely we conform.

Literature teaches us to leave writers alone.

Composure

When only a poem can get through to you.

When Hamlet said his "machine" (his body) was "to him" he meant also that he had within him "that which passeth show" (his soul).

Mechanical advantage belongs to God (or Nature, if you will). Our machines belongs to us (or Culture).

The truth is a secret that does not need to be exposed to work.

Writing well forces you to be yourself.

When a man dies, we ask those who knew him what they have lost. This interests us and helps us to live. We don't care what those who hated him feel they have gained. Those emotions debase them and make us smaller.

What raw experience do poetry and philosophy refine today?
To what rough approximation do they bring their precision?

Literature maintains the connection between language and experience.

When a poem moves you, you feel the words as words.

When a philosophy calms you, you think them as such.

We try them out and learn their use. We dwell upon them now.

Proximally, and for the most part, your existence (being) belies your existentialism (angst).

That is, your body has solved the problem of existence before your mind raises it.

I'm pretty sure that this is the basic lesson of meditation.

"Language is conceived in sin," says Quine, "and science is its redemption." Yes, and language is then born in innocence, and politics is its perdition.

For philosophy, the body is a problem:
How does it exist?

For poetry, it is the solution:
How it does inspire!

Poets try to extricate our history from our politics.

Philosophers help the world recover from science.

Folk Psychology

We think that some things are true,
and some people just feel right.

Doubt is to belief as fear, to desire.

Without the other, each is nothing.

For a long time, I thought
that literature was a cop out:
one should live,
not write.

I occurs to me now
that literature is a kindness:
one should let live
and write.

Mandates are to justice
as methods, to truth.

Institutions are our immediate point of contact with culture, the meaning of our acts on their face.

Likewise, intuitions are our immediate point of contact with nature, the meaning of the facts as they appear.