I keep thinking about that attempt I made to characterize people I get along with, a few days ago.  Thereâs a specific thing there but Iâm just not sure how to phrase it.
Itâs like a sort of ⌠feeling that the world is bigger than you, and very complicated, and filled with things youâd never expect.  Itâs not exactly âskepticism,â and not exactly âhumility.â  Itâs compatible with having a high view of oneself or oneâs intellect, though not with certain versions of those things.  Itâs compatible with strong and numerous opinions, too, though not with certain ways of having strong and numerous opinions.
Itâs having your most instinctive response to the world be âthis is billions of distinct things; this is jeweled chaos; this is a buzzing, blooming confusion.â  And then you make models and concepts to try to make some sense of it.  Sometimes you become quite attached to them.  Sometimes maybe too attached.  But if you become too attached itâs not because you think your concepts are reality.  Itâs because you feel youâll be so terribly lost without them.
When I try to think of the opposite of this temperament I think of those sorts of political or culture bloggers who are never surprised by anything, who always respond to every news story with âoh, look, more of the thing I know about, doing the things I know it does.â  Itâs not that these people are too political, or too certain.  Itâs that their politics and certainty doesnât feel like a lifeboat theyâre clinging to in a vast roiling ocean.  They give off the impression of not seeing the ocean.
And lots of things follow from this. Â You have to find ways of living with this ever-present sense â sometimes dulled, but never gone â that reality is too large, grotesquely large, that youâll never find your way in it. Â So you learn to revel in it a bit, to become an eclectic, an amateur, collecting and admiring little bits of jeweled chaos. Â You collect #quotes. Â You learn to laugh when you see something you donât understand, so that you donât instead despair.
You feel wary about systems, you feel wary about things that are top-down and a priori.  You like data.  But not in the sense of âthe data is inâ; not in the sense that we have measured, so now we know, and now no one can ever question again.  But you are always worrying that you are missing the forest for the trees, because there are so many trees, too many, too many.  You distrust the single event, the dramatic example, because you know that reality has room for everything, because you have enough such specimens pinned and mounted in your collection to prove any claim or its negation.  You want the species, not the specimen â but you feel deep down that that has to be hubris, because all you see are specimens, and the great whirling confusion laughs at your taxonomies.
You come to observation, to experimentation, to something like science, even to something like positivism, not out of a zeal for the general but because you know the particular will wash over you and crush you. Â When the concepts are stripped away everything is laughter and awe and horror and you bring the concepts back, not to perfect life, but simply to bear it. Â And you tend to your collection.
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