Breakfast, walk along the Cam, retreat back to Suffolk. Mounting anxiety about the work still undone and the tempers I have roused recently.
Pontificated about deep pragmatism, defending the need for drone strikes and arguing that because most people care less about evidence than arguments that support what they already believe that it is both expedient and justifiable to ignore evidence. Do I even believe this? So rapidly find myself entrenched in a position in an argument simply because I want to hear the sound of my own voice, then retroactively have to fabricate reasons to support the side I find myself on.
Very quick and joyously undisciplined Turner copy, then a pleasant evening with Montaigne, who has the strength of character to talk about sex, farts, impotence, incest frankly and unblushingly. I wish I wasn't such a prude when I'm writing. He's great, immensely self aware, practical, part of the real world.
In truth, the care and expense of our fathers aims only at furnishing our heads with knowledge; of judgment and virtue, little news. Exclaim to our people about a passer-by, “Oh, what a learned man!” and about another, “Oh, what a good man!” They will not fail to turn their eyes and respect toward the first. There should be a third exclamation: “Oh, what blockheads!” We are eager to inquire: “Does he know Greek or Latin? Does he write in verse or in prose?” But whether he has become better or wiser — which would be the main thing — that is left out. We should have asked who is better learned, not who is more learned.
We labor only to fill our memory, and leave the understanding and the conscience empty. Just as birds sometimes go in quest of grain, and carry it in their beak without tasting it to give a beakful to their little ones, so our pedants go pillaging knowledge in books and lodge it only on the end of their lips, in order merely to disgorge it and scatter it to the winds.
It is wonderful how appropriately this folly fits my case. Isn’t it the same thing, what I do in most of this composition? I go about cadging from books here and there the sayings that please me, not to keep them, for I have no storehouses, but to transport them into this one, in which, to tell the truth, they are no more mine than in their original place. We are, I believe, learned only with present knowledge, not with past, any more than with future.
Michel de Montaigne - Essays
