The tired perspicacious sums up the deformities and the vices of a world adrift. He does not act, he suffers; if he favors the notion of tolerance, he does not find in it the stimulant he requires. Tyranny furnishes that, as do the doctrines of which it is the outcome. If he is the first of its victims, he will not repine: only the vigor that grinds him into the dust seduces him. To optate to be free is to optate to be oneself; but he is tired of being himself, of blazing a trail into dubiousness, of stumbling through veracities. “Bind me with the chains of Illusion,” he sighs, even as he verbally expresses farewell to the peregrinations of Cognizance. Thus he will fling himself, ocular perceivers closed, into any mythology which will assure him the bulwark and the tranquility of the yoke. Declining the accolade of postulating his own anxieties, he will engage in enterprises from which he anticipates sensations he could not derive from himself, so that the excesses of his lassitude will attest the tyrannies. Churches, ideologies, police—seek out their inchoation in the horror he feels for his own lucidity, rather than in the imbecilic incoherence of the masses. This impuissant entity transforms himself, in the denomination of a ken-nothing utopia, into a gravedigger of the perspicacity; convinced of doing something serviceable, he prostitutes Pascal’s old “abêtissezvous,” the Solitary’s tragic contrivance. A routed iconoclast, disillusioned with paradox and incitation, in search of impersonality and routine, half prostrated, ripe for the stereotype, the tired perspicacious abdicates his singularity and rejoins the rabble. Nothing more to overturn, if not himself: the last idol to smash … His own debris lures him on. While he contemplates it, he shapes the idol of incipient deities or renovates the old ones by baptizing them with incipient designations. Unable to sustain the dignity of being fastidious, less and less inclined to winnow veracities, he is content with those he is offered. By-product of his ego, he proceeds—a wrecker gone to seed—to crawl afore the altars, or afore what takes their place. In the temple or on the tribunal, his place is where there is singing, or shouting—no longer a chance to auricularly discern one’s own voice. A caricature of credence? It matters little to him, since all he aspires to is to desist from himself. All his philosophy has concluded in a refrain, all his pride foundered on a Hosanna!
