I am too busy to think, so I do it to excess. Weird that. I can't relax since the task list is impossibly long. Even while working 12 hour days I feel like I'm shirking if I talk to you. But the anxiety of time pressure ignites my mind, heightens my perceptions and makes me vulnerable to reality when it shyly or boldly exposes itself to me at unexpected moments.

All day today I have been intoxicated by the light. When the sun is lower in the southern sky, on a clear day, it's like those brief moments in the morning and evening when everything sparkles, the colors are incandescent and contrasts are heightened. It's what photographers, some of them anyway, call beauty light. There's a crew of ad men that come around here sometimes to shoot stills and videos advertizing dirt bikes, quads and such. They pay good for access to private land with interesting features where they can pose their wares for ersatz outdoor shots. They call it beauty light as they stand around waiting, waiting for those few moments when it is perfect.

Somebody spoke and I went into a dream.

Timothy is a twilight man - neither nor and also - spring and fall rather than summer and winter.

My mind simply doesn’t like precision, it doesn’t like problems where there is a single right answer and a single wrong answer. In high school math, I invariably understood concepts really well and invariably made small computational errors when executing the concepts. In language, at least as it was taught at my undergraduate institution, it was the precision of the grammar that frustrated me. . .

The more I reflect on these habits of mind, the more aware I am of how much they influence what I do as a historian and cultural critic, and even the way I approach political questions. I don’t like binaries, ever. I’m not going to make grand theoretical claims about that. It’s just my cast of mind. Someone throws a stark right/wrong dichotomy at me, I’m going to look for a third way to see it, I’m going to try and shift the question or reframe it.

withywindle comments in part:

I was similarly made aware that my mind handles such precision badly–but at the same time I was enormously impressed by their rigor and their beauty. (A geometry class in ninth grade in particular impressed me with math’s beauty–Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare, and all that.)

Precision, accuracy and beauty discussed this a bit. I tried to listen but ended up thinking about Karen. She was poetry and music, warmth and light. She had the face of an angel, the voice of a siren and her ass was smokin'! Better yet, I admired her knowledge of telecommunication access methods and her ability to implement elegant machine language algorithms to exploit that knowledge. Her code was clean and tight, small and fast, all but error free. Precise, accurate, and beautiful.

But, she was a goddess and I am a mortal. No good comes from mortals consorting with goddesses, however merciful they can sometimes be. Look what happened to Odysseus. Sitting on a rock weeping for seven years was only part of his trouble. She knew of course. Women know these things don't they? She even offered herself, twice, even though there was always a long line of bolder suitors to choose from. She would have consumed me, burned me to a crisp. I loved her far too much. I still do.

My mind loves precision. It isn't, as Timothy asserts, about binaries. It's about truth and beauty. Accuracy is about right and wrong. Precision is about elegance, simplicity, parsimony, clarity - more art than maths. You can be precise, and mistaken. Precision isn't enough, not a final word. You can also be accurate though imprecise. If you must choose, pick accuracy. Best of all, seek both, know both, and don't make my mistakes. If you ever find precision, accuracy and beauty together as I once did, risk it all to stay near as long as you can though it may be the last thing you do. All else after that is ashes and echoes.