What of supporting foolish consistency foolishly?
Or supporting wise inconsistency wisely?
Is the result dependent upon the nature of the support, or of what is being supported?
And is the nature of the support knowable before the support is given? Perhaps support given in absence of knowing the nature of that which is supported may be foolish, but is it necessarily so? Let us say that apparently foolish support is given to consistency of an unknown nature, and that this particular consistency later proves wise. Is not the apparently foolish support now clothed in the wise nature of that which it has supported?
But I posit that the consistency later proves wise.
Howbeit if such proof stands suspended, or must be conjectured, if the nature of a consistency can only be claimed in terms of the gravity attached to its eventual revelation as wise or foolish?
Enter Pascal. Also not from around here. At least, not anymore.
Knowledge is as the waters of the whole Earth, and the greatest of human minds can encompass but a single drop.
And yet the total exploration of even that single drop absorbs a lifetime of investigation.
In the end, the drop returns to the whole.
It is unchanged for our having examined it, but if we be honest men we shall have been changed by the examination.
I think I may have nodded off in the middle of your sermon, but it doesn’t matter.
You’re trying to confuse me. It won’t work, you know. (I’ve spent the last few years developing an immunity to iocaine powder.)
Water? I am water. — It’s in the poetry book. You can look it up. (Our Side of the Wall — ‘Face has a copy.)