Once
upon a time there was a young man who dreamed of reducing the world to
pure logic. Because he was a very clever young man, he actually managed
to do it. And when he had finished his work, he stood back and admired
it. It was beautiful. A world purged of imperfection and indeterminacy.
Countless acres of gleaming ice stretching to the horizon. So the clever
young man looked around the world he had created, and decided to explore
it. He took one step forward and fell flat on his back. You see, he had
forgotten about friction. The ice was smooth and level and stainless,
but you could not walk there. So the clever young man sat down and wept
bitter tears.
But
as he grew into a wise old man, he came to understand that roughness and
ambiguity aren’t imperfections. They are what make the world turn.
He wanted to run and dance. And the words and things scattered upon this
ground were all battered and tarnished and ambiguous, and the wise old
man saw that that was the way things were. But something in him was still
homesick for the ice, where everything was radiant and absolute and relentless.
Though he had come to like the idea of the rough ground, he couldn’t
bring himself to live there. So now he was marooned between earth and
ice, at home in neither. And this was the cause of all his grief.
