I hope you won’t be put off. You see, I am a man of no principles. Or better: Whatever principles I may or may not possess tend to be annulled by those that may or may not be attributed to me by other interested or disinterested second or third parties. In any event, the net effect is the same: What could be, what could have been, a cornucopia of truths, nuances and contradictions, gives way and concedes to … nothing. These are not distant states of being, but simply the binary difference between “1” and “0.” It is this difference that is of concern to me, as I should think it would be to anyone, with or without principles.

          It has been said: “There are many rivers, but there is only one sea. All rivers lead to the one sea. And the rivers carry everything with them to the sea. You can rest on the banks of the river, you can wade along the shores, you can let yourself be carried by the current, or you can fight your way upriver. It makes no difference to the river or the sea. Sooner or later, everything comes home to the sea.”

         You will have come to understand that I have been writing all this time not to you, but rather to myself. You have done the work of being a sounding board and have given me a chance to listen to my own echoes. You can't do that with just anybody, just with people who understand what it's like standing at the edge and hoping that some resonance finds its way back to you from across the wide chasm. In other words, you can only do this with people who, like me, are left searching for principles.

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