methinks so. The intellectuality, the tragedy....
I quote:
"Complete certainty was an illusion; of that he was certain. There were only greater and lesser degrees of uncertainty in our lives, and that was enough. It was, in fact, better than enough; for although we always want to reduce the degree of uncertainty in our lives, we never want it to disappear entirely since uncertainty is what puts the play in the joints. Imprecision, the sportiveness, as it were, of the quanta, is what makes life interesting and change possible. Holmes liked to call himself a "bettabilitarian": we cannot know what consequences the universe will attach to our choices, but we can bet on them, and we do it every day.
For although Holmes believed that experience is the only basis we have for guiding our affairs, he also believed that experience is too amorphous, or too multiple, ever to dictate a single line of conduct. Experience makes everything blurry at the edges; it reduces knowledge to a prediction of what should be the case most of he time, and we treat a prediction as an absolute at our peril..."
"He read, all his life and in every field... But it all amounted, for Holmes, to an endless, fascinating, beautfitully empty diversion, since at the bottom of every passionate belief and noble expression he saw the same armies of the night, fighting the same eternal war. There are, one comes to feel, only two spheres in Holmes' thought: the glittering toy store of art and ideas, and the darkling plain of Fredericksburg and Antietam. Most of us spend our lives in a middle world, in which beliefs matter to us for reasons better than the fact that they happen to be ours. Holmes lived in that world, too, of course, and he must, each day, have feit its reality urgently enough. But it seems for him to have been largely inarticulable. The inner life was one of the few things about which Holmes had nothing to say."
Fuckin' Menand. He's like a love letter to my brain.
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