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The Best Joke I Know
I’ve heard a lot of jokes, but this remains my all-time favorite. Like all the best jokes, there is something to it beyond humor. It contains an observation of humanity. Here goes. A traveller hears about an old wise man who lives in solitude at the top of a nearby mountain, doing nothing but meditating,…
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Condescension
Someone who deliberately talks over your head, wants you to sit at his feet. Knowing big words and smart talk isn’t wisdom, it’s jargon. Useful for speedy conversations among people in the same knowledge circuit, but when used outside of them, jargon is a passive-aggressive tool of intellectual intimidation – the conversational equivalent of a…
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Twin Homilies
Violence is never the solution, except when it’s the only solution. It is best to be prepared for violence, even if you hope never to use it – one might even go so far as to say that strengthening oneself for the possibility of violence is part of the self-preparation of a truly devoted and…
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To start with, a poem…
How, in his still-sighted dreams,does Polyphemus rumble now?In his Mind’s Eye the aim was ever true:his boulders take the ship and Wretched No-Onepast the Iridescent Blue,into the Morbid Depthswhere all but Titans drown. I wrote that poem in my sleep, on a frigid night in a glorified tenement house in London, in 1996. I say…

