The Literating of the Literatus

excerpts from my diary.

“If I were to search for the true name of this endeavour of mine,” I sometimes say, “it would not be thinker or critic, but dweller.” The literatus is one who dwells in thought, in time, in contradiction. He sees the world not as a diagram, but as a lived-in house, drafty with paradox and patched with stories. To write, then, is not to solve, but to attend. It is not to merely escape the crookedness of life, but to tarry with its dissonance.

In Plato’s cave, the prisoners mistake shadows for truth because it is the most immediate and emotionally available reality. If one of them is freed and turns toward the light, the journey is painful, blinding, disorienting, and hard to trust. It is easier to stay in the comfort of the familiar dark than pursue the clarity of the sun. So too, in our time, so many prefer the comforting shadows of dogmatic opinions over the blinding, strenuous light of real transformation. Let your fingers, let your heart, be free. You can just do things.

I understand, intimately, the seduction of sentiment over strategy. There is a historical rhythm to this. The early Christian martyrs were once cheered on by crowds hungry for catharsis. What they wanted was not truth but spectacle. So too today, people treat the internet like a coliseum, where blood is replaced by takes, and martyrdom is measured in comment-section ratios.

Don't you think strategy will have little purchase in such a world? I think it is too slow, too cold, too unshiny. Sentiment, by contrast, dazzles. It moves swiftly and loudly. It invites loyalty without proof. That, I like.

In every age, the popular and the wise have been uneasy companions. Montaigne knew this. Emerson, too. Truth, when it does arrive, tends to come dressed plainly and asks for your hands.

This is not, strictly speaking, a critique of dogma or of spectacle either. You will see, as you move through these reflections, that contradiction is not a bug but a feature of the literatus. Even this paragraph may be unnecessary. But necessity, as with meaning, is often overestimated.

Today you may argue. Tomorrow, you may indulge in needless pedantry. Only keep your voice. That, at least, is yours. And that is enough, for one who writes, not for consensus, but because he can. Like a literatus.

The purpose of an open mind is the same as that of an open mouth—eventually to close on something.

Last week, my friend, J.J., said something that struck me as quietly monastic: “I’d rather have all the talk in my head than say it out, unless it’s really necessary you won't catch me saying some things.” Her words did not surprise me. I, too, have long dwelt as a suppressor of words, but never thoughts. I am the man who thinks all the time. The one who has nothing to think about except thoughts. I then diverted my insistent version of thoughts into something more tinctured with form. Something shaped. Something literary. Like a literatus.

I have often felt that the philosopher deals with the skeleton of reality, the dry bones of logic, abstraction, principle, whereas the literatus handles its skin and breath, its warmth and wounds. The philosopher dreams of systems; the literatus dreams while awake, in the streets and in his kitchen, where socks go missing and grief leaves stains. To be a literatus is to commit a kind of intellectual domesticity. To prefer the creased map to the clean globe.

It is not, I believe, a deficiency of rigor. It is a choice of loyalty.

The philosopher wishes to know what justice is; the literatus wonders if his grandmother’s sense of fairness, bitter with love and soft with bias might not be closer to the truth than all the treatises of Rawls. The philosopher pries apart the universal; the literatus picks up what the universal forgot to notice.

A reason for an essay such as this one is to assert that I do not simply write essays; I sometimes inhabit them, like rooms. And the best of them are always slightly lived-in: a stray sentence here, a beloved prejudice there. An unspoken ache in the footnote. That is because the essay is not so much an argument as it is a gesture. It does not pretend to fix the world, only to point to it and say: “Here, too, is truth.”

Much of what masquerades as philosophy on the internet today is, in truth, little more than unvarnished dogma. People do not embrace these pronouncements for their reasoned merit, but rather out of a ritualistic compulsion. They offer belonging and a sense of moral high ground. “You are not failing,” they whisper, “the world is broken.” These mantras soothe the chaos inside.

Frankly, embrace your newfound validation, I simply do not care. What troubles me is the relentless projection they enact: having incarnated this performance, they demand universal assent, as though dissent might inflict upon others some metaphysical injury to ear or eye. It morphs into a newly forged persona, defended with fervor, argument upon argument, straw man or no straw. Can you let us see road?

I have long preferred to share my more extended reflections here and on other personal platforms rather than on my X page, partly because these philosophers often tend to descend upon that space. Let me explain better: If my current thoughts are on capitalism, it does not say “this is everything I have on capitalism”; there will be others, but they lie dormant for now. I will share them when the moment arises, or perhaps I will choose silence instead.

I write chiefly because I can. I strive for clarity, yet I do not shoulder the burden of excessive scrutiny or pedantry, that is not my calling. Choice, with all its particularity, defines me. This is a divergence from the philosopher, whose pursuit is often otherwise.

And perhaps more than anything else, the literatus is a creature of affection. As Auden once said, "we are lived by powers we pretend to understand,” and among those powers, I count love, fear, and preference. Even thought itself must pass through the gate of the heart before arriving at insight. The literatus, unlike the anxious, modern lover, is not ashamed of this.

Who is the modern intellectual if not a bureaucrat of neutrality? Does he not fear prejudice like a virus and treats passion like a contaminant? Isn't this the farce? That the longing to be above bias is itself the most domineering bias of all? How can one who cannot float above the world like a drone still claim to know the taste of bread?

There is no view from nowhere. Every thought is thought from somewhere, by someone. Every question, even the most abstract, is asked with a voice that belongs to a throat, to a body, to a people.

Curiosity itself, perhaps my most admired secular virtue, is selective. Why this question, and not that one? Why now, and not before? The motives are buried like roots in the dark, it twists through soil that bears the scent of childhood, memory, pain, and half-remembered poems.

To pretend otherwise is not virtue. It is cowardice.

Yes, prejudice is dangerous. But so is water, and fire, and the impulse to kiss someone in grief. Prejudice—better called prior attachment, or committed orientation, is not the enemy of thought, but its womb. We love before we know. We trust before we verify. And the question is not whether we have prejudices, but whether we examine them. Whether we carry them like luggage or like heirlooms.

The terror of newer thinking is not simply that it has biases, but that it forgets its own. It is all too happy to denounce a man for loving his own, his child, his language, his land as though love must always be symmetrical. Wouldn't that only mean symmetry is the standard of love? Guess what? It is not. I do not love all children equally. I’d love my daughter most. And in this asymmetry lies my humanity.

To love the universal without loving the particular is to love an idea and not a person. It is easier to love “the oppressed” than it is to love your neighbor who snores and says bigoted things. The former asks for your applause; the latter, your patience. It is easier to campaign for funding for Palestine than to give your starving neighbour some money to feed.

Dostoevsky knew this: the general is easy; the specific, with its smells and blemishes and non-negotiable needs, is hard. But it is also holy.

Even the Incarnation, that deep scandal of Christian theology, was an act of particularity. God, if one permits the thought, did not hover above history like a principle. He entered it. Took on sex, language, blood. Became Jewish. Lived under empire. Was sentenced by a petty Roman administrator named Pontius Pilate. The universal took on a passport. The absolute came wearing sandals.

What does this mean, except that to be human is to choose? To constrain oneself? To say: “This, and not that. Here, and not everywhere.”

And so the literatus writes not from The Elysium, but from his bedroom table. Not with an angel’s clarity, but with a man’s hope. He does not pretend to possess the light of detachment. Instead, he seeks the light that comes through things, the kind that filters through stained glass or the pages of a dog-eared book, casting coloured shadows on the floor.

In this way, prejudice, the right kind, is not a shackle but a filter. Not a cage but a cradle.

For we are bound to love, and love binds us to things. To homes, faces, seasons, to one language over another. This is not evil. This is the condition for knowing anything at all. To know is to lean in. To prefer. To dwell. To literate.

I prefer to know the world not as a principle, but as a place. Not as a theorem, but as a theater. Everyone wears a costume, speaks in an accent, and walks with a limp. Where truth is crooked, like the timber of which man is made. And where wisdom, God help us, must still be shouted from the gates.

This show must simply go on.