On recent reflection, I was left with a distinct sense that I, the square peg, could never fit into the round hole.
For years I bemoaned my straight edges and sharp corners. How unfit my shape, how crude and unrounded. So many of the other sort passed busily by, with their sagacity on curvature, its uses and benefits. Such reasonableness and confidence in their voice as they described the failings of rectitude. How important, they said, the many concerns and anxieties with which they filled their days and preoccupied their minds.
You see my dear square, they implied, how vitally urgent that you shed your angles and your lines and your self for here we have determined what rightly one ought become.
There can be no more serpentine and pernicious recourse than the recourse to “experience.” In one word, we bring low another and dismiss whole lifetimes of accumulated judgement as childsplay. So expansive the contempt it strikes at the soul of its target without appeal.
Yet experience is the thinnest of qualities: the mere accumulation of events resulting from the passage of time. The “experienced” man has managed little more than to hang on to the Earth as it swung once more around the Sun. It is the wanton and irresponsible equating of experience with Wisdom that betrays experience as the terrified cad it is in daylight revealed to be.
Wisdom, you “experienced” wretch, is the product of copious reflection, qualification and self-doubt. To acquire Wisdom is to volunteer for that unique torture delivered inescapably by one’s own mind. Wisdom dismisses what is apparent, agreed upon or well regarded. Wisdom invites the scorn of others, the social disapprobation that in early times meant certain death.
Speak not to me or anyone else of your experience. We are as apt at counting the revolutions of the Earth as you. Speak instead of that perspective and those ideas that, uniquely yours, add to humanity’s aggregate enlightenment. You will then have the attention of all those who, futilely or not, busy themselves with the construction of Wisdom.
The squareness of the peg was most suitable. It was the roundness of the hole that made a mockery of Creation.