Each human life has its own propensity to illumination.
---J.B.

I think we forget that. Either there is no such thing as illumination; or what little there is is reserved for us alone.

It takes the heart time to catch up; it takes the heart time to learn what it always knew. You don't set much store by intelligence these days, having seen through vast swathes of your own idiocy. And the most pompous and ridiculous show of ignorance that one invariably finds at the university. The research university, with its fixations and pedantry, its killing of wonder in the name of general facts, causality, theoretical sophistication and useless refinement. 

This fascination with progress, with the acquisition and possession of greater and greater knowledge (little of which can produce beauty, or be integrated into a life lived well). Add to it, one grain at a time. But what do you have at the end of it all? That isn't a mathematical puzzle but an ethical one.

What counts can be counted. And only what can be counted counts. The bottom dollar is all the context you need.