Intellectual Achievement. The Exercise Of

Intellectual Achievement. The Exercise Of Skill. Human Feeling.

I'm Too Drunk To Recall Much Of What I've Said. Which, Come To Think Of It, Is Probably Just As Well, Judging By The Way People Who Are Normally Quite Sensible Dissolve Into Gibbering, Rude, Opinionated And Bombastic Idiots Once The Alcohol Molecules In Their Bloom-stream Outnumber The Neutrons, Or Whatever. Luckily, One Only Notices This If One Stays Sober Oneself, So The Solution Is As Pleasant (at The Time, At Least) As It Is Obvious.

Oh, They Never Lie. They Dissemble, Evade, Prevaricate, Confound, Confuse, Distract, Obscure, Subtly Misrepresent And Willfully Misunderstand With What Often Appears To Be A Positively Gleeful Relish And Are Generally Perfectly Capable Of Contriving To Give One An Utterly Unambiguous Impression Of Their Future Course Of Action While In Fact Intending To Do Exactly The Opposite, But They Never Lie. Perish The Thought.

It Was A Truism That All Civilizations Were Basically Neurotic Until They Made Contact With Everybody Else And Found Their Place Within The Ever-changing Meta-civilisation Of Other Beings, Because, Until Then, During The Stage When They Honestly Believed They Might Be Entirely Alone In Existence, All Solo Societies Were Possessed Of Both An Inflated Sense Of Their Own Importance And A Kind Of Existential Terror At The Sheer Scale And Apparent Emptiness Of The Universe.

Reason Shapes The Future, But Superstition Infects The Present.