When she was sixteen she had a strange disease. A salivary gland started swelling and hardening and hurting. Then she started spitting little stones. Finally she had a complicated surgery to remove the defective gland which slightly damaged a facial nerve. That’s why, from sixteen on, she only smiled half smiles and she only loved half loves - for her, the two things were intimately connected.

Now that she was alone in her kitchen, cutting into the leathery skin of a pomegranate and making the heart-shaped fleshy rubies crumble to the white plate, she thought:

“This is what my blood would look like if what happened to my gland had instead happened to my heart. Then, whenever I’d cut myself, I would bleed strangely beautiful pomegranate arils. And then the boys would want to suck my knees whenever I fell, my fingers whenever I cut myself cooking and my lips whenever the biting frost of winter made them crack. They would suck the juicy seeds with burning lips, play them with their tongues and finally crush them with a lusty bite.”

It’s a recurrent fantasy of mine. Books reaped in bookstores are planted on bookcases and, when time is due, and they’re ripe for reading, they simply fall to the floor with the gentlest thud, bleeding the carpet with their bittersweet juice, like some strangely beautiful fruits.

Both Socrates and Aristotle were at some point in their lives charged by the authorities of Athens on the (alleged) grounds of their seditious views on religion and morals. But whereas Socrates chose to die as a matter of principle (either because one should obey all laws of the state, or because a true philosopher is never afraid of death), Aristotle fled Athens determined not to allow the city to “sin twice” against philosophy.

Every day, life confronts us with situations where we have to choose between the Socrates and the Aristotle way. Whether it’s a wrangle in the morning traffic, an argument at home or a quarrel at the office, Athens often charges us with the most unjust claims. What’s worse, sometimes it’s us who are suddenly put in the role of Athens and have then to choose who we’d rather have on the other side: a brave and  forbearing Socrates or an apparently sissy Aristotle?

Sissy. That’s what I used to think of Aristotle when I was young. But now I wonder. What if his was the most strangely beautiful decision of the two? What if being good in ourselves isn’t really enough? Do we truly keep being good after we willingly allow someone else to be bad?

Until recently, sustainability was, for governments, companies and individuals alike, either a hobby, a mere marketing strategy or, at best, the preserve of some lonely visionaries. With the economical and financial crisis, it became a necessity, a matter of survival.

Well, I’m sad to say that I can’t put much faith in the sustainability of sustainability itself. At least not the kind of sustainability that is being desperately sought after in this desperate times of ours. Why? Because it’s a sustainability of the physical alone. A sustainability that concerns itself only with finance, economy, environment and the body. Not spending more than we earn, not letting the pleasures of today impair the pleasures of the future, sharing now so we don’t be robbed tomorrow and the like.

All this is, needless to say, a very welcome change. But my fear is that, as soon as the crisis is gone, much of this effort for a sustainable life will be lost, and many of our non-sustainable behaviors of old will quickly resurface.

The only way to avoid it is, I think, to make sure this plight of ours for physical sustainability goes hand in hand with an equally persistent search for a cultural, moral, spiritual, emotional and psychological sustainability.

Because, as long as I haven’t learnt to truly care for others, to rejoice in pleasures and possessions but never becoming their slave, to genuinely endeavor to understand others (the ones who have less, the ones who know less, the ones who think differently), to rule my life by principles that are fully workable (i.e., realistic and tolerant both of the principles of others and of my own nature and limitations), to deal with ambition and frustration in a healthy way - in short, as long as I’m not a sustainable being I won’t be able to lead a fully sustainable life.

And this is why it’s so strangely beautiful that, like Sarah Bakewell puts it, “the [philosopher] who has the most to offer our troubled 21st century” is, after all, a man born in 1533 - which only comes to show how sustainable a mind he had! His name is Michel Eyquem de Montaigne and his Essays - if not for everything he thinks, at least for how he thinks everything - can very well be the ultimate handbook for this kind of mental sustainability without which no world inhabited by humans will ever be a fully sustainable world.

It seems to me there’s a big confusion going on since times immemorial between truth and - let’s say - reality. A confusion that gradually brought us to a regrettable overestimation of truth as some kind of copy, synopsis or translation of reality.

Lies, secrets, errors and ignorance, all came to be regarded in a generally disapproving way. Lies and errors because, consciously or unconsciously, they both substitute a “false truth” for the “real truth”. Secrets and ignorance because they represent the negation of truth, both unforgivingly preventing it from “coming to light”.

And then, there’s fiction, which only doesn’t get the same treatment because it has always been very properly (and very identifiably) accommodated between the walls of theaters, cinemas and opera houses or the covers of books. Nevertheless, the close commerce between fiction and lies is very clearly stated in this famous Nabokov quote:

Literature was not born the day when a boy crying “wolf, wolf” came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying “wolf, wolf” and there was no wolf behind him.

As good fiction shows, truth isn’t the mere copy, synopsis or translation of reality. Sometimes (or for some people) it’s quite the opposite of reality. And reality (which we so easily mistake for truth) is much overestimated by our culture. That is very patent in the way we think so highly nowadays of “being honest”, of saying what we “really” think about people, even if it means making complete sociopaths of ourselves.

Of course I teach my children not to lie. Of course I deeply hope they always work to correct their mistakes and get as much knowledge from life as can be taken. Of course I’d hate them to keep some secrets from me. And of course I wouldn’t want them to live in a world of complete fiction. I just happen to know that, like me, they lie and will keep on (technically) lying every now and then for the rest of their lives, that they will always make mistakes and will never know much more than Socrates knew. And most of all, I sincerely hope they keep some secrets from me and that they won’t end up living in a world of complete desolate reality.

And if you don’t take reality to be the whole truth there are a few things you too know are true:

That fiction, as someone said, is “a lie that tells the truth”. That ignorance, as Montaigne said of “bad memory” (in fact, but a form of ignorance), can be the very reason for us to probe things with our own minds and form our own opinions, instead of just letting ourselves be guided by the ideas of others. That truth, like the portuguese writer Vergílio Ferreira wrote, “is but an error waiting for its turn”. That secrets are a good part of what makes us who we are. That lies can often do much more good than bad. And that any real progress for us as a collective or as individuals always comes down to a deviation from truth, instances where we either correct, expand or simply challenge it - and thus grow. And, if nothing more, at least for that, secrets, lies, errors, ignorance and fiction can be strangely beautiful things indeed.

Yesterday my 11 year-old daughter asked: “Is it true that if you really believe in something, magic makes it come true?” My answer was: “Yes, it’s true. Only, in that case, magic becomes something even more magical than magic itself.” “What?” “Determination followed by hard work.”

I know it’s not the most strangely beautiful thing to say to a romantic young girl. But sometimes I just feel the world has already far exceeded its endurable quota of frustrated-lazy-and-not-really-that-young-nor-exactly-romantic people.

Geometry can be a strangely beautiful thing, especially when applied to human relationships. Think of a love triangle. Would four people in love form a love square? And what if two of them get more in love than the other two? Will we have a love trapezium, or a love rectangle,  or a love lozenge then? And what about two people in love? Do they form a straight line, unstably poised like a seesaw over love itself, its extremities almost always at odds, one up, the other down, and rarely leveled in bliss? And when a baby comes - do those two people become a circle at last?

By default, one tends to think of teaching and learning as two sides of the same coin. Maybe it isn’t always true. Maybe there’s actually a lot of things that can (and, in fact, have to) be learnt but can’t really be taught. Like loving, creating, being a parent, playing like Messi or Ronaldo. Precisely the things that are the most strangely beautiful of all.

Synesthesia is commonly defined as a neurological “condition” or “disorder”. One in which stimulation of one sense automatically leads to involuntary experiences in another. It’s a strangely beautiful thing that all art is, at its most masterly, the voluntary seeking of that “disorder”, in us and in others.

Ours is a time, not only of bytes, but of bits. Bits of film, bits of music, bits of literature, bits of art, bits of data. It’s the internet, the blogs, the social networks, the wikipedia, youtube, email. We go from quote to quote, picture to picture, clip to clip, without the faintest idea of the context from which those bits were excised. Sometimes we do pause to look around and get our bearings, but mostly we just rejoice in the pleasures of traveling light and non-stop.

It’s a widely known fact and there’s no shortage of voices pointing to its multiple dangers and infinite sorrows. Believe me, I wouldn’t even mention it if it wasn’t to disagree. Perhaps this bit culture of ours can be a most enlightening and creative thing after all.

It’s true a mere quote won’t say much about the work it came from, its author and their place in our culture, but the words are still there, and sometimes taking them from their context can be the most illuminating thing you can do to them.

Imagine coming across Lear’s answer to blind Gloucester when, meeting on the fields near Dover, the latter asks for the former’s hand to kiss it:

Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality.

Even if you don’t know anything about the play, the characters or the author, these still are perhaps the most beautiful and meaningful words ever written by man - and I confess I even feel a certain envy for those of you who can read them and feel them at their most pure, precisely without the burden of all their contextual implications.

Not knowing anything about the context, you can put Lear’s words into anyone’s lips, anyone’s pen, anyone’s life. The possibilities are almost endless. The only things beyond the regenerative powers of your reading are the truth and beauty at the heart of the words. Anything else is completely at your command. And what a strangely beautiful thing it can be.

Like taking Chagall’s fiddler for a children cartoon. Like picking up Lalique’s orchids diadem to actually put it in water. Or - like my son did once - looking at an 8 and marveling: “Look, dad! It’s a snowman!”

In english as in several other languages, “talent” comes from the Latin

talentum, from the Ancient Greek τάλαντον (“scale, balance”), (…) one of several ancient units of mass, as well as corresponding units of value equivalent to these masses of a precious metal. (Wikipedia)

This sense of the word is the one at stake in the well known Parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30), that tells the story of a man who, before leaving into a far country, gives 5 talents to one of his servants, 2 to a second one, and 1 to a third. When he comes back, both the first and second servants had doubled the amount of talents in their possession and were amply rewarded by the master for having made such good investments.

Then he which had received the one talent came and said, Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed. And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine. (KJV)

The master then rebukes him severely and order that the servant be stripped of the remaining “talent” and cast into outer darkness, where “there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth”.

This just goes to show how you can find all kinds of strangely beautiful things silently hidden in words. Like talent being productive only if one isn’t afraid of making mistakes. Like the fact that talent was originally a quantitative notion, intimately related to money. Or the fact that it takes talent to create talent - something which is often neglected in our companies and educational systems.

But, in the whole story of talent, maybe what strikes me as the most strangely beautiful thing of all is this notion that we all need some kind of talent (whatever that talent may be) to fulfill our humanity. After all, as the Wikipedia reminds us, talent is

approximately the mass of water required to fill an amphora.

A strangely beautiful thing just happened: I took a cigarette from the pack with one already on my lips. It’s like looking for your glasses with them on your nose - usually the kind of thing you just dismiss with a smile, ascribing it to some typical absent-mindedness or some extraordinary weariness.

For me, though, it’s like a performative monument to something remarkably human. I just don’t know exactly what. Whether it’s the effortlessness with which our mind splits into different planes of reality absolutely disregardful of each other. Or rather the impressive amount of reality that, no matter how close and tangible, just goes by completely unnoticed.

And then again, maybe it’s both.

With the years, I came to look at this trait of mine as something not altogether pleasant, at least for others. No matter the subject being discussed, when people seem confused, I tend to be assertive and systematic; when people show some degree of certainty, I usually muddle everything up by demonstrating the equal validity of all the other possibilities.

My wife attributes this to an idiosyncratic sadistic relish of mine at contradicting other people just for the sake of it and then watching them grope for any kind of  intellectual grasp. Even if I admit it to some degree - and though sincerely sorry to contradict her once again - I think there’s more to it than that.

If you read Shakespeare closely enough and let yourself be guided by Jonathan Bates (with the help of Hazlitt, Empson, Keats and others), you soon realize what has made him the greatest genius that ever lived: his uncanny inability (or “negative capability”, as Keats called it) to form one thought without, simultaneously, forming its exact opposite. In other words, the inability to think good without thinking bad, to think freedom without tyranny, to think peace without war, to think Hal without Falstaff, Prospero without Caliban, Arden without the court, being without not being - and vice-versa. Which explains why he’s the most misquoted wretch on earth, everybody ascribing him views that as soon as they are uttered by one character are instantly contradicted or questioned either by another character, by performance (i.e., acts, not words), or even by the psychological truth of the speaking character itself. Which explains also why the same lines could, throughout history, have been quoted by communists and nazis, left and right, one school of thought and its direct opposite. 

Not long after I realized this, I stumbled upon the Winter 2008 issue of Rotman Magazine. Two articles were especially interesting. One was an extract from Roger Martin’s book The Opposable Mind, concerning “integrative thinking”:

“These leaders [with exemplary success records] share at least one trait: the capacity to hold two diametrically-opposed ideas in their heads. And then, without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other, they are able to produce a synthesis that is superior to either opposing idea.”

The other article was The second road of thought by Tony Golsby-Smith:

“The heart of the Two Roads story is that the western world bought the wrong thinking system from Aristotle. This ranks as one of the worst investment decisions our civilization has made, and it has led us into using the wrong toolkits for our enterprises ever since. The thinking system we invested in was Aristotle’s ‘analytics’, and we made the choice around the era of the Enlightenment which ushered in what we today call the Scientific Age. That decision has proven so sweeping that it now monopolizes what most people characterize as ‘thinking.’ (…)

What few people realize is that Aristotle conceived two thinking systems, not one. (…)

In one brilliant essay, Aristotle laid down the path for deductive reasoning that has dominated the western mind for the last 300 years. With it, we have built what I call the ‘logic road,’ and it carries pretty much all of our intellectual traffic these days. (…) The logic road convinced us more than it convinced Aristotle. He was always uneasy about the inputs into the system. He was confident that his inference-making engine worked well, but what if we could not trust the inputs? He never answered that question to his satisfaction (…).

[Aristotle] was smarter than we were in rushing in and over-investing in his logic product. He significantly limited the application of his analytics engine to a certain domain of truth: he called this domain ‘where things cannot be other than they are.’ By this he meant the realm of Natural Science. If you have a truth question concerning the realm of nature or any realm where things do not change, by all means use the logic road. But he said that this domain was not the only domain for truth making. There was a second domain which he characterized in the memorable phrase, ‘where things can be other than they are.’ By this he meant the whole domain of human decision making, where we in fact ‘play god’ and determine alternative futures.

For this second domain, Aristotle conceived an entirely different thinking pathway that combined invention, judgment and decision wrapped up in a social process of debate. He called this process ‘rhetoric’ or ‘dialectic’, and I call it the Second Road to truth. Aristotle described it just as fully, as his analytic engine in various books including the Rhetoric and the Topica. The critical difference between the two roads is always best understood by the different domains of question that they address: rhetoric was the road by which humans designed alternative futures; analytics was the road by which we diagnosed what already exists.”

Finally, browsing Frank Chimero’s blog, besides his article On Paradoxes, that couldn’t resonate more with all I’ve written so far, I stumble upon this quote of a David Foster Wallace interview, where he recounts how a teacher of his used to say

“good fiction’s job [is] to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”

And here’s my point:

No matter if it’s fiction or politics, design or business management, art or child raising, it seems to me that whenever we put our minds to their utmost capabilities, it’s not really in the conclusion that lies the real achievement: it’s in the process, the movement, the “dialectics”. Thinking one thing and its exact opposite. Comforting disturbance and disturbing comfort. Looking, like Norma Bar says he does, at “negative spaces”: “the space between two cars, instead of [or, as I’d rather have it, together with] the cars”.

So, maybe my relish in contradiction is not entirely futile and sadistic after all. Maybe it’s just me trying to do my part. Maybe it’s just me at my most human. Maybe it’s just me using the mind as the mind feels more powerful and complete: as a strangely beautiful shark. Moving incessantly from argument to argument and from perspective to perspective. Knowing all the time that if it stops, it ceases breathing and soon dies.

[See also: Indecision and The thin line]