A few weeks ago, I realized why I haven't finished my next blog post yet. (Yes, it really has been over six months since I started writing it.)
It's the same reason why I take days to write a three-page philosophy paper for class.
It's the same reason why, as I have gotten older, my speech has become more halting, filled with parenthetical comments that threaten to sidetrack me from finishing the sentence I began. My friends probably know what I'm talking about here.
It's the same reason that popular writers like Richard Dawkins or most political commentators can write so many words with so little value.
Nuance.
Lack of nuance is very easy to have. It also tends to reveal a lack of intellectual discipline.
The use of nuance is a striving against, and an implicit admission of, the insufficency of the human mind to grasp the depth of reality, and of language to express it. It's almost a kind of wisdom, of humility, and even of courage.
It seems that the more we are able to see into reality, the harder it is for us to talk about it.
After his mystical experience or vision toward the end of his life, the great philosopher Thomas Aquinas said that what he had written was like so much straw, compared to the reality of those things he had written about--and this was a man who was the master of nuance. It makes one wonder how much we are missing, in every conversation, discussion, and argument, in every phone call and facebook post and blog post... I suspect we're leaving out a lot.
Perhaps to recognize that, can itself be a kind of humility, a kind of wisdom. Perhaps to keep talking and writing anyway, can itself be a kind of courage.
And perhaps ending this blog post is itself an act of mercy.
