Toutes choses sont déjà dites; mais comme personne n’écoute, il faut toujours recommencer.

André Gide, Le Traité du Narcisse

A sense of literary sophistication begins when aesthetic standards are substituted by moral judgements. This makes art a profoundly amoral undertaking, but a profoundly interesting one as well.

David Berlinski, The Advent of The Algorithm.

De manhã, no Cais do Sodré, o comboio vomita pessoas como se fossem uma doença; vai-as acumulando, como bactérias, de Cascais a Algés mais ou menos. A partir de Belém começa a dar-lhe uma comichão e coça-se e cospe e sua gente, de Alcântara até Lisboa.

You said that what makes you sad when we talk is that I am intelligent and you’re not.

I clumsily tried to explain that my skill is limited to manipulating language constructs and that it does not necessarily follow that I am equally apt at manipulating concepts or at deducing them from the amount of language that I have in stock. Intelligence is a convention, one that doesn’t partcularly interest me. We should be talking either way beyond it or way outside of it.

Today I thought about this rationality that you so vehemently criticize when we inevitably disagree.

After all these years I stand here wondering if part of the problem isn’t simply semantic. As Phaedrus quickly identified the trap of using quality (as in characteristic, not goodness) when discussing Quality (as in goodness, not characteristic) and vice-versa, so I must question if your disconfort really lies with my attempts at applying reasoning to your argument. I mean that maybe you shouldn’t question the results produced by the tools (i.e. my conclusions) but the fact that maybe the tools are incomplete, unfit somehow.

I know what angers me. It isn’t that I use a less than perfect method, but rather that the usage of that method is making you refute the validity of any method.