settle when the spirit says settle

After reading a chapter of a certain book (not a factual book, precisely, but a book about life, one might say), I found myself thinking--aha, I believe I learned a new thing just there, at that one part. But really, to say I read these hundreds and thousands of words, and learned one new thing. What a disgusting sort of idea, to be so immune. Because, supposing one comes to the point where there is no longer any possibility of a new thought. Imagine this with me--we cannot mean that we know and understand everything, of course. That is not the reason for our immunity. It is simply that we have come to the end of our ability to entertain a thought beyond. Beyond...what? But this is exactly it, we could no more answer that question now than to think the thought we had missed.

So now, our reading (or, far more telling if you are sensitive to this sort of thing, our conversation) consists of what? But this is the part that will really devastate one. As you read, you feel no more than a shifting of the furniture of your brain, or let's even say your soul. A temporary realignment of this idea and that idea to make the simulacrum of a new idea. But there is never any particular reason for these things to be aligned in one way or another way (since by definition a simulacrum will be quite secondary) and like chunks of brightly colored play-doh, eventually it is even by the clumping and re-clumping that a hard, sort of brown color is achieved which further recombining, though it should change the shape and cast, can do nothing to erase or alter. No, those that insist that there must be one particular arrangement or another, they should be patted on the back, really, for trying to do us all a certain type of favor.

For, after all, it is only sensible, as I just was writing in the post below, to suggest that at a point in development one comes to the part where it has generally been no longer necessary to go on learning things at some great rate (or even a slow rate, as some of us have been blessed with). Deep within your sort of evolutionary blueprint there is a sort of plaster. Beyond here, you are supposed to be fairly functional. You are no longer supposed to have to be figuring things out. This means the pliability of one's mind somehow ceases to be an asset, because growth, which had made that pliability useful and necessary, has slowed. To be fair, we should probably specify that it would be less artificially depressing if we suggest that the nature of growth has perhaps merely changed (do you start to observe this brown color now?), and it is no longer necessary to expand oneself. Let's take, for example, the possibility that it is simply necessary to harden oneself.

It is self-evident that this will be a dangerous sort of business.