Chapter Two
The purpose of this chapter is to familiarize us with key terms and how they apply. Through them we come to know the thing, what’s held inside the thing, and who benefits from their combination. This knowledge is so unlike the knowledge of stalks in winter, their elegiac whimpering, or of earth rising up to your shoe-tops––which correlates with consternation and grievous, though temporary, affliction––that we shut our books and stare at it. Whenever such terms fight for space we should listen to what they have to say. Often their uses are far from clear, but without them how could we conceive of what we lack? If they mystify at first, we slowly come to learn that there’s something precious they pursue, over the mountaintops of thought, still warm from the secret of its birth. And with great conceptual industry we begin to rethink our former views, convincing ourselves that if the means by which we achieve what we desire are flawed or false, the sights they evoke might still be real enough, and could be perfect, the foretaste of a state that flutters through all prior states, bringing them to a close.
