The Pent Umbrage of the Tempy, Part XIII

You had rushed ahead speaking of details and the causes and effects of “details.” (Can you speak of cause and effect without thinking in terms of details?) You know you’d better back up just a bit.

You had started out playing the game so you would not be tied down to details. Details you knew were menial. They were not for you. You were good at inventing strategies to avoid getting tied down to details…This ability had been seized upon in a way you found very delightful, remunerative, delicious. To cut through unnecessary detail…detail clogging smaller minds unable to see through it…was to great advantage to some who had the resources to open doors you wished would be opened to you…And they were. Similarly, (the same operation, really), to invent plausibly necessary details which were nothing of the sort, was of advantage to these very same.

The very activity of dodging details was pleasurable. It was a form of dance, of movement. The details were fired out of a canon, a kind of slothful canon which fired slo-mo, stupidly, and you were without effort at least ten clicks ahead of each firing…But it was still fun. After all, if you goofed, and were hit by one of these canon balls, you’d be dead. There were many times when you, resting from inventing ways to dodge details, were also inventing ways to put yourself into risk of being directly hit by details. That latter was what you called research.