For every grain of wisdom there is a grain of folly

"Never play God about anything”… Advises David Schwartz…. “Nature hates monopoly…for every grain of wisdom there is a grain of folly” adds Emerson… It is not a new thought….Epictetus felt the same in those ancient times and advised his fellow Greeks…“It is the peculiar quality and character of an undisciplined man, and a man of the world, to expect no advantage, and to apprehend no mischief from himself, but all from objects without him. Whereas, the philosopher, quite contrary, looks only inward, and apprehends no good or evil can happen to him but from himself alone.”……Epictetus was a philosopher…a critical thinker…who sees the world through lens of logic….he can justify others’ acts but not of himself which he knows more than others…..

Poets don’t like to stand should by shoulder with philosophers…they love their romantic imaginations and think of them as highest form of human endeavors…..Nothing can equalize to them….not even the love that they have darkened pages over pages for few millennium that we have record of…listen to Elizabeth Barrett Browning….how she describes a poet…….Milton,

………“Yet the great Milton was not made by what he received; not even by what he loved. High above the current of poetical influence he held his own grand personality, and there never lived poet in any age (unless we assume ignorantly of Homer) more isolated in the contemporaneous world than he. As Cromwell’s secretary and Salmasius’ antagonist, he had, indeed, an audience, but as a poet, a scant one, his muse, like the sphinx’s tune, being inaudible, because too fine and high.”.......

Well, all poets may not agree with Elizabeth….they may regard love the source of their worthiness….Poetry is a box where we can throw all poets….they all would cry about love but it would never happen that they agree on loving each other…. I don’t know how much truth is in W. Winter’s claims but he sings of friendship very high and loudly,

“Think of me as your friend, I pray,
For else my life is little worth;
So shall your memory light my way,
Although we meet no more on earth.
For while I know your faith secure,
I ask no happier fate to see:
Thus to be loved by one so pure
Is honor rich enough for me.”

Hmmm, although, the contradictions cause suspicion…yet, we don’t have any way to measure the honesty of poets… La Bruyere, advises us to listen to poets seriously… They speak of love…that is enough to listen to them….other way is of hatred…no matter how much reasonable and valid is the hatred….it has no price in it….and it devalues anything attached to it…La Bruyere puts it this way, “If you hate your enemies, you will contract such a vicious habit of mind, as by degrees will break out upon those who are your Friends, or those who are indifferent to you.”……..

Anon…..protests to my suspicion…. He argues that poets can’t fake their hearts….It is just imaginations that have not enough colors to shade all what is in heart….and it is the eyes that can’t see all the lights that heart emits….. and it is words that can’t carry all the weight that pulls the heart….he wonders,

I wonder if ever a song was sung,
But the singer’s heart sang sweeter?
I wonder if ever a rhyme was rung,
But the thought surpassed the metre?
I wonder if ever a sculptor wrought
Till the cold stone echoed his inmost thought?
Or if ever a painter with light and shade,
The dream of his inmost soul betrayed?

Well, there are a lot of weights in words of poets and sometimes make my heart sink to the bottom of emotions…. And it makes the head dizzy too…bony is the skull but the brain inside is very light and energetic…. It pushes up…saves not only the skull of falling and rolling on the ground but also light up heart and make it float back on volatile seas of emotion…. Brain says to hear that no one dies of sinking in Dead Sea but dies of its saltiness…. La Rochefoucauld says….”The head is always the dupe of the heart.”……………

Though the debate is lively and amusing but I don’t have the gut for century’s long conversations…. I take the Emerson’s words,

“Nature hates monopoly……. For every grain of wisdom there is a grain of folly….”