In Search of Wit...

Why does one turn skeptical? The general belief has it that people who can't achieve something turn against it and console themselves by negating the need of that thing:

GB Shaw said:

"Those who can, Do; Those who can't, Teach."

Not very far from reality. You give it your best shot and you fail. Either because it is a conspiracy against you (so you would like to believe) or your best was not good enough. And then comes the time to find someone to put the blame on. For, things that don't have a conscience, eventually become the poor victims of our critique. And to what objective, just to prove that they are not worth all the efforts invested in them.

The fun however is to have wit. A sense of humor, in order to detach yourself from the evaluation of a situation. You can't do it doesn't mean that no one else should ever try it either. Or that you should yourself never try it again. I tried my hand at a semi-porn fantasy somewhere in this blog and it was appreciated by a handful, though dismissed straightaway by most of my friends who believe I should invest my time in something more meaningful rather than wasting my talent in this apparently useless art of eroticism.

Alexander Pope says in his "Essay on Criticism",

In the search of wit these(poets) lose their common sense,
And then turn critics in their own defense.


Something that should be avoided as far as possible. Because the actual realization of your efforts is in analyzing why you went wrong, rather than dwelling upon self pity and effacement. You can turn on something as easily as cleaning you bowels when the pressure is great but the real test of character is in holding it back, hanging in there.


So the cowardly remarks like "There is whole world lying in front of you, forget about it." should be pro-actively discouraged and you should stick to your gun. You never know when you might fire that perfect shot. It's worth spending the whole life in trying to reach that perfect shot. No one and nothing is more important than that perfect shot of yours that is still there in your head and hasn't transcended into the physical world yet.