What Makes Cowards of Us All

Consciousness is not a fact, e.g., the fact that "there is something that it is like to be." Consciousness is how it feels to think.* There can be no thought without feeling, no belief without desire, no understanding without obedience.

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*Note that pregnant phrase: "how it feels." How what feels? It. The body. I think but it feels. Consciousness is how it does its thinking: by feeling. The body feels to think

and, thus, I am.

Style is the meeting of
knowledge and mastery.

Your lifestyle is where
your view of life meets
your hold on it.

Thinking is the ability to make up your mind.

Feeling is the ability to take it to heart.

Philosophy and poetry arise from our dissatisfaction with usage. Prose must make use of the language as it is.

(Philosophy, qua literature, is less like prose and more like verse. It accomplishes itself, not in its apodictic assertions, but in its obiter dicta. The "strophes" of poetry become the "remarks" of philosophy, which writhe against the immedicacy of, respectively, our institutions and our intuitions. What matters is not what is stated, but what is turned. Mallarmé's "divagations" and Williams's "improvisations" may be mistaken for prose, as may Frege's elucidations and Wittgenstein's investigations. Mistaken, I say; mistaken. Poetry and philosophy betray their essence when they aspire to science or politics, to say what is and what should be, i.e., to prose. The reader betrays them by taking them straight.)

What I am trying to say is that, beyond our own determination and capriciousness, there is the determinism and caprice of nature (what happens between facts and acts) and culture (what happens between beliefs and desires).