[TXBlair]

Thank you for all of your hard work throughout this election season, poconopundit! I am going to take my time reading through each of these and will keep relishing the sweet taste of election victory!!

[poconopundit]

Much appreciate your kind comment, TXBlair.  It's a labor of love -- and the little man in the control room of my brain can claim no credit for what's created.

God is the one who delivers the gold nuggets.  The writer is nothing more than a panhandler who's trained to see the sparkle of superior ideas and word chains amid buckets of sifted thoughts and sand.

For example, that last paragraph is the result of 30 minutes of thinking, typing ideas down, tweaking them, and once or twice deleting whole sentences because a new angle was discovered.

The miraculous thing is that God rewards the effort.  As Emerson wrote:

What is the hardest task in the world?  To think.  Try as I may to look in the eye of an abstract truth, but I cannot.  I withdraw on this side and the other.  I seem to know what he meant who said, No man can see God face-to-face and live.

For example, a man explores the basis of civil government.  Even if he intends his mind without rest in one direction for a long time, his effort delivers him nothing.  Yet thoughts are flitting before him.

We say, I will walk abroad, and the truth will become clear to me.  But we go forth and still can't find it. 

Then we imagine the stillness and composed atmosphere of the library will seize the thought. But we come in, and are as far from it as we were at the start. 

Then, in a moment, and unannounced,the truth appears.  A certain, wandering light appears, and reveals the distinction, the principle, we wanted.

But the oracle comes, because we had previously laid siege to the shrine.

Intellect from Essays: First Series (1841)