>You're interested in being *right* and you throw
>up atrocity exhibits like a prosecutor at trial.
>
>Chuck is being... I don't know... more artful?
This is an instance of things being the opposite of what they are. After I sent this I remembered "artful dodger" and looked up "artful" where I found this example:
><the artful lawyer got the witness to admit he had been lying>
So I should have used artful to refer to Wojtek, not Chuck.
This has also reminded me of a reference I heard last week in, of all things, Ken Burns's new installation of his baseball documentary. I very much like this "negative capability" idea.
It's Keats talking about Shakespeare in a letter:
http://classweb.gmu.edu/rnanian/Keats-NegativeCapability.html
Brown and Dilke walked with me and back from the Christmas pantomime. I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.