I have been tempted, in this essay, to rehearse the liberal arts as they were known in antiquity. But I realize now that I am little concerned with concreteness, and much less with reality. The Center of Inquiry is more qualified and better equipped to handle facts and falsifiable claims. No, I admit, I have let my delusions guide me. That I even hope C&T will survive long enough to withstand reform suggests the extent of my megalomania. I am adding two and two and hoping for five, I am running at a concrete wall and expecting to fall through the atoms, stoppering an Erlehnmeyer flask with the mad expectation that I will decrease the entropy of the universe. “Impossible,” you say. “The laws of thermodynamics state that…” Yeah, yeah, yeah. Damn the torpedoes.
In the classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee reveals that the father, Atticus, has hidden certain glorious details of his past from his two children. Namely, that he is a crack shot with the rifle. The response of the children is important. Scout, the narrator, discovers that she didn’t know something about her father, namely, that her daddy is the “deadest shot in Maycomb County.” Jem, older and wiser, is developing an awareness that for the first ten years of his life he didn’t know anything about his father. The incident leaves him shell-shocked: “ ’d you see him, Scout? ’d you see him just standin’ there? … ’n’ all of a sudden he just relaxed all over, an’ it looked like that gun was a part of him … an’ he did it so quick, like…”
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