There was once a story of a young man who dreamed about reducing the world to pure logic. Because he was a very clever young man, he actually managed to do it. When he finished his work, he stood back and admired it. It was beautiful, a perfect world purged of imperfections and indeterminacy. Countless acres of gleaming ice stretching into the horizon. So the clever young man looked around the world and decided to explore it. He took one step forwards, and fell flat on his back. You see, he had forgotten about friction. The ice was smooth and level and stainless, but you couldn’t walk there. So the clever young man sat down and wept bitter tears. But as he grew into a wise old man, he came to understand that roughness and ambiguity are not imperfections, they are what make the world turn. He wanted to run and dance, and the words scattered on the ground were all battered and tarnished and ambiguous. The wise old man saw that that was the way things were. Yet something in him was still homesick for the ice, where everything was radiant and absolute and relentless. Though he had grown used to the idea of the rough ground, he could not bring himself to live there. So now he was marooned between earth and ice, at home in neither. And this was the cause of all his grief.
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