i can't stand these idiots

"When her fellow second graders did not understand a math lesson, she recalled, she would jump up and yell, 'I can't stand these idiots,' prompting her teacher to send notes home."

another good line from this weekend, in "The Name of the Rose": "Adso, if I knew the answers to everything, I would be teaching theology in Paris." now he'd teach theory, but really it's the same.

and lying sleepless in the middle of the night, i came up with: we feel contempt for weaknesses that are not our own. there was another good one, too, but i lost it. must have turned over one too many times. i did have a sudden clarity about my intellectual passions these days, that i think i am trying to advance and synthesize the four classes i was taking senior spring: aesthetics, art and society, french critical theory, and the poetry workshop. the foundation is in the poetic, shot through with paradoxes of literature and ethics, representation, epistemology, ontology, all cast in, what shall we call it, the weary (and wary) anxiety of this late historical moment?

and then there is a sort of shadow question, the question of whether it makes a difference to the fate of our culture, our hearts, and our minds, whether we accept the reality of the sacred. i think i once penned this question as St. Francis vs. The Good Life. but that may disguise the question as being about the necessity of renunciation, or suffering, or may leave the inquiry too conventionally within the christian. as i mentioned to am and la last night, for a long time, i was happy to resolve the question of the sacred as a part of human life, and so real enough for me. even imagined or imaginary, the axis orients us. but i have the impulse to push this question as far as possible, to, i think, look at the nuts and bolts of the ethical and ask how it is it functions, what it rests on, how to take care of it.

oh! i remember, my other good line from last night was, you can't make people believe in goodness, but you can show it to them.