In recent months, I’ve spent a
lot of time thinking about the old Plato axiom about
knowing enough to know you don’t know anything. To the extent that I can have
a conversation or argument with someone and each of us come away with a
completely different interpretation of what happened, this axiom strikes me as true (or useful.) In the past week alone for instance, I’ve apologised to several people about what I feared might be
unreasonable behaviour on my part, only to be told
they hadn’t noticed anything amiss in the slightest. It hence seems folly to me to assume that anything is
wrong with anyone, unless of course they make it
plain that I HAVE done something to upset them. (I am, for instance,
pretty sure that I’ve upset an old friend to the point
where they won’t respond to me, entirely because of
this philosophy that people are not sensitive to the point of being paper thin.
This is something I obviously regret.) But on the whole, I can’t
assume that people on the street or on the train are going to break down and cry
because of a perceived slight. The world doesn’t work like that and people (me included, I suppose) learn to toughen up and get on
with things. The other advantage to this approach too is that it takes a
lot of pointless weight off your shoulders. Being concerned that people might be hurt or upset,
when in fact there’s no real cause to do so,
prompts a lot of useless stress and
anxiety. It means for one that you constantly double guess
yourself.
One thing I am realising though is that, though it perhaps isn’t right to make judgements and so-called
insights about the world, this is something you can
still do regarding art. So I’m starting to get
critical about music and prose again. Listening in particular to Love Is Stronger Than
Justice by Sting last night, something occurred to me. Each line of the song is a complete statement unto
itself. Each line relates to the song as a whole of
course, but can also be digested as an independent
asset. It turns out this is something Sting does a lot.
It must be because he’s appealing to the mass market,
and so breaks down his theses into bite-size chunks
for public consumption. The pretentious
git. Ho-hum. Not so interesting perhaps, but I like that I’m allowing myself to make observations like this
again.
