Method and Meaning in an Unteachable World

Prefatory Note

The following are two companion reflections—On Truth and Empirical Fact and No Arc, No Lessons—presented together under the shared heading Method and Meaning in an Unteachable World. Though each may stand alone, they are best read in conversation with one another. Both essays resist the comforting notion that history, literature, or art functions as teacher or guide, and instead consider interpretation as an act of encounter—provisional, situated, and shaped as much by silence as by statement.

The first essay explores the distinction between fact and truth, exploring how memory, intention, and metaphor complicate the act of knowing. The second rejects the idea that history bends toward moral instruction or cumulative wisdom, and instead proposes a posture of reflective attention to the recurring patterns and failures of the human condition.

Versions of both essays with full citations and scholarly apparatus are in preparation for future publication. What follows here is intended for open reading and contemplation.

On Truth and Empirical Fact

“You cannot step into the same river twice.”
—Heraclitus (Fragment 91, DK B91)

In the course of recent reflection, a distinction long known, but not always properly honored, must be drawn again: that between truth and empirical fact. Though often conflated in casual discourse, these are not synonymous—nor should they be.

An empirical fact is a datum: observed, measured, verified. It is the yield of experiment, the result of record, the artifact of sensory perception. That water boils at one hundred degrees Celsius at sea level is a fact. That a coin weighs 3.2 grams and bears a cross upon its reverse is a fact. That a battle was fought in the year 1066 may be supported by a host of facts: chronicles, bones, weaponry, et cetera. Such facts, when properly corroborated, are not unimportant. But they are not truth.

Truth, if it exists at all, is something larger, more elusive, more alive—not constructed by us, but encountered when consciousness prepares itself to receive what appears. It does not come when summoned, but when the conditions for its appearing have been made ready: doubt, humility, attention. It is apprehended in this prepared openness, grasped in the space between what is seen and what is understood.

Philosophers have long attended to this disjunction. Plato distinguished between the world of appearances and the world of eternal Forms, the former unstable, the latter enduring. Augustine found truth not in the fluctuating realm of sensory report, but in the divine Logos. Nietzsche, ever unsettling, dismissed truth as a “mobile army of metaphors”—useful, yes, but neither objective nor stable. Heidegger, resisting the reduction of truth to correctness, instead spoke of aletheia—not truth as correspondence, but as unconcealment, as that which emerges into view. And Gadamer—whose influence upon this approach is not accidental—taught that truth emerges in understanding itself, not as a proposition but as a happening, shaped by dialogue and historical consciousness.

Facts may be marshaled. Truth, by contrast, is survived.

Even intention, often treated as the surest witness to truth, must be interrogated. The poet’s intent, the author’s purpose, the painter’s design—these are not fixed coordinates but shifting recollections. Memory does not preserve; it reconstructs. And with each return to the well of what was once meant, the water tastes slightly different. Heraclitus observed that one cannot step into the same river twice—not only because the river flows, but because the self who steps in is no longer the same. So it is with intention. If asked now what was intended in a particular line or gesture, one may offer a reply—but it is a construction, shaped by who speaks now, not by who once acted. Intention, like truth, is not preserved in stillness—it is shaped in motion. It, too, is not possessed, but pursued.

In the poem At the Crossing, the aim was not to name truth—such a thing cannot be done—but to describe the space it haunts. The poem speaks of words that fracture, colors that deceive, touches that both reveal and withdraw. It ends not in assertion, but in a trembling, a silence where meaning nearly forms but does not solidify. A reader once dismissed it: “Life is too brief,” he said, “to spend in the space where meaning almost forms.” The impulse is understood. But the objection must be declined.

For it is in that space—that trembling margin—that life does happen. To live fully is not to claim truth as possession, but to encounter it as presence. Not to seal it in certainty, but to allow it to move, shadowlike, across the inner walls of the soul.

Empirical facts anchor us to the world. But truth is not what anchors—it is the thread we follow across the abyss.

And we follow it not with measuring tape, but with metaphor, with memory reshaped each time it stirs, with intention half-forgotten, and with the courage to walk where the light breaks, not where it rests.

No Arc, No Lessons: On Method, Encounter, and the Tragic Repetition of History

“To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’… It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”
—Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

Each age brings forth its own imperative—shaped by its wounds, haunted by its questions, driven by its unspoken needs. The present is no exception. Whether in the study of history, the contemplation of art, or the exegesis of sacred or poetic texts, interpretation does not arise in a vacuum. It emerges from a condition: the place, the moment, the unease that calls forth inquiry. And yet, though each generation may believe itself newly burdened or singularly illuminated, the recurring gestures of human life belie that novelty. There are patterns, yes—but these do not confirm progress. They reveal persistence.

The idea that history bends—toward justice, truth, wisdom—is seductive. It offers shape to the shapeless, comfort to the anguished, and direction to the lost. But there is no arc. The metaphor distorts by promising what experience consistently denies. If history teaches, its students are unteachable. The same motives recur, the same errors repeat, the same vanities endure. Progress, when claimed, is often little more than a rearrangement of circumstance. The root remains.

The players do not change. Their names shift, their languages evolve, but their roles remain remarkably constant. Power is sought, justified, and abused. Fear is stoked and traded for security. Hope is minted into symbols, then worn threadbare. Love, loss, betrayal, glory, shame—these are the constants. The stages differ: the scenery updated, the choreography modernized. But the script draws upon ancient instincts. And the audience, again and again, forgets the last performance, believing the story to be new.

Images of Warsaw Ghetto 1943 and Gaza 2925 ruins ... same destruction, different players, same human patterns.

Interpretation, then, cannot rest on the assumption that knowledge leads to virtue or that understanding necessarily yields transformation. It may. But often it does not. History is not a teacher. Art is not a moralist. Scripture does not condescend to pedagogy. If anything is revealed, it is revealed despite the will to ignore, deny, or disfigure it.

This position echoes Walter Benjamin’s image of the Angel of History, whose face is turned toward the wreckage of the past even as a storm drives him blindly into the future—what we call progress. It stands also in contrast to the historicism that treats the past as lesson-book or path to telos. Gadamer reminds us that understanding is not methodical recovery, but an event of fusion between past and present. Yet this fusion must be entered with humility, not control.

Given the absence of reliable progress and the persistence of human patterns, interpretation requires a different posture—one that recognizes repetition, resists despair, and permits meaning to arise without demand. Method, in this context, must be understood not as a tool of conquest, but as a lens—no more authoritative than another, yet capable of bringing certain essences to the surface. Every method is partial, shaped by its assumptions, animated by its framing questions. No method sees the whole. Each reveals what it is attuned to find. Truth, if it appears at all, does so not as result, but as event—as something glimpsed when the interpreter is prepared to receive, not to impose.

Three words mark the contours of a fitting approach: nexus, interaction, and reflection.

Nexus identifies the place of convergence—where past and present, text and reader, artifact and witness intersect. It is not discovered in isolation, but emerges through relation. Interaction marks the dynamic movement within that convergence. Meaning is not fixed; it arises through tension, difference, and engagement. Reflection follows—contemplative, fragmentary, often incomplete. It does not assert finality but honors process. It acknowledges that memory reshapes what it recalls, that intention fades into approximation, and that even the most careful exegesis remains provisional.

This echoes the work of Paul Ricoeur, who reminds us that narrative, memory, and identity are always under construction—never final, always revised in the act of remembering. Warburg’s concept of Nachleben der Antike—the afterlife of antiquity—reveals how cultural symbols and images recur across historical periods not as static forms but as charged fragments, reanimated under new conditions, carrying both continuity and transformation in their repetitions. This persistence of symbolic forms across time exemplifies the broader pattern: not progress, but recurrence with variation.

From art, history, and sacred text, nothing must be demanded. They may instruct, but only when they are permitted to resist instruction. They may illuminate, but not on command. They may wound, they may deceive, or they may pass in silence. The encounter must be enough.

Empirical facts can be gathered. Archives can be organized. But truth, if it comes, does not arrive catalogued. It appears only when conditions are ready—when the reader or viewer stands not with certainty, but with openness. Not as master, but as interlocutor.

Too often, only the facts are preserved. They are worn as tokens of knowledge while the truth behind them—uncomfortable, paradoxical, demanding—is left behind. The lesser lesson becomes the badge of wisdom; the deeper truth is dismembered for convenience.

No arc. No grand instruction. Just the repetition of roles, the echo of stories, the persistence of hunger. Meaning, when it comes, comes not as reward, but as grace.

And yet, even in refusal, in distortion, in failure, there remains something sacred in the effort to attend. To see the pattern, not to worship it. To hear the old lines in new voices. To walk the ruins with open eyes, knowing that the script will be performed again.

On the Nature of Moments

Some time ago—perhaps a year or more—I shared the thought with a friend that, in the absence of a life partner, career milestones, or the outward markers many associate with ongoing joy and fulfillment, I found myself sustained by something smaller, more elusive, yet no less profound: moments. Fleeting as they are, these glimpses—of joy, beauty, tenderness, or connection—carry a weight that lingers long after they pass. Whether in laughter with a friend, a burst of color in nature, the unexpected joy found in art and music, or the hush of shared silence, these moments are what remain.

This conversation was brought to mind earlier today, during a pause in some simple yard work. A robin—one I have come to recognize—perched beside me on a rock for nearly twenty minutes. He did not fly, only hopped, watching me as if we were resting together. That brief companionship, quiet and unexpected, brought back the full force of that earlier insight.

The poem that follows is a first, rough attempt to give shape to that reflection.

Moments

by Donald S. Yarab

After so long,
I see it now—
life is not the grand arc
we thought we were writing,
not triumph etched in time
or years stacked with care.
It is moments.

The held door,
a beat longer than required.
A cloud painting itself
across the sky.
A flower blooming
through a crack in concrete.

The hum of a bee,
the song of a bird,
a friend’s first hello—
welcome, familiar music in the air.
Laughter spilling like light
through a quiet room.

A touch that speaks
without language.
Sunlight flickering
through leaves—
nature’s own Morse code.
The warm drift from the kitchen:
garlic, hope,
onions, memory.

The first bite of something sweet
dissolving on the tongue.
The joy of someone you love
laughing till they snort,
till they can’t breathe,
till you’re laughing too
at nothing,
at everything.

These—
small rebellions
against the world’s weight:
its monotony, its cold indifference.

But the moments—
oh, they persist.
They slip through the cracks
of our hardest days
and remind us
why we stay,
why we watch,
why we dare to hope
for just one more:

one more kindness,
one more beauty,
one more laugh,
one more flicker of light—
each a defiance,
each a benediction
in this brief, bright,
impossible gift
of being alive.

My Friend, You Were There: A Reflection on Complicity

History shows that evil rarely marches under banners we immediately recognize. Too often, it comes draped in righteousness, purity, and fear. This piece is a lament for how easily we have been—and still can be—drawn into the machinery of cruelty.

My Friend, You Were There

My friend,
When the Holy Catholic Church, seeking to preserve the Faith in all its radiant purity,
instituted the Inquisition,
you were there—
not as a bystander,
but as a willing voice.

You denounced the old widow,
who lived alone with her cat.
You whispered against the Jewish family—
familiar, yet forever marked as other—
and gave your assent to their undoing.

You crowded into the square to watch the trials.
You sang hymns
as the flames crowned their bodies with smoke.
You wept tears of joy
that the world was made purer that day.

My friend,
When the ships came heavy with human cargo,
and the auction blocks stained the soil,
you were there.

You placed your bids.
You weighed their flesh.
You wrote the laws that chained their children.

You sang hymns on Sunday,
and broke their backs on Monday.
You called it providence.
You called it order.

My friend,
When the traders came with flags and rifles,
when the rivers flowed with rubber and blood,
you were there.

You signed the charters.
You counted the profits.
You sold the shackles and the scales.

You called it commerce.
You called it destiny.

My friend,
When the banners of the Reich unfurled,
and the drums of destiny beat their hollow call,
you were there.

You shouted with the crowds
as glass shattered from shopfronts.
You signed the letters,
you cheered the laws,
you raised your hand high in salute.

You bought the house,
the shop,
the art your neighbors were forced to leave behind.

You praised the strong hand
that swept away the weak.
You rejoiced as neighbors vanished,
grateful that your streets were made clean.

My friend,
When Stalin summoned the will of the people
to root out the enemy within,
you were there.

You reported the whispered doubts
of your cousin,
your friend,
your brother.

You paraded with red flags
while the trucks rumbled into the night.
You filled the quotas.
You seized the land.
You counted the spoils
as others disappeared.

You sang of the bright tomorrow
as you cast your eyes down
and stepped over the absent.

My friend,
When Mao lifted the Little Red Book,
and the children cried out against their fathers,
you were there.

You led the chants.
You scrawled denunciations across the walls.
You struck the old professor who dared to hesitate.
You cheered as the temples fell,
and the old poems burned,
convinced you were building a paradise
on the bones of the past.

My friend,
When Pol Pot promised that the fields
would bloom with new life,
you were there.

You marched the teachers into the paddies.
You pointed the rifle.
You praised the year zero
that would erase the memory of all that came before.

You smiled
as the world was reborn in silence.

My friend,
When the generals rose in the name of order,
when the prisons filled and the stadiums overflowed,
you were there.

You nodded at the names.
You counted the profits.
You watched the blindfolded taken at night.

You called it security.
You called it salvation.

My friend,
You have always been there.

Only too late did you realize.
Only too late did you doubt—
but not much.

You fell silent,
lest you betray your doubt.
You looked away,
lest you see.

You told yourself it would be different this time.
You told yourself you had learned.
But the signs are familiar.
The words are familiar.
The silence is familiar.

And it is happening again.

Thin Books Are Dangerous

**“Every door leads deeper. Every step farther from certainty.”**
(Samuel van Hoogstraten, Perspective View of a Corridor, 1662, oil on canvas)

Prefatory Note

In my youth — now roughly four decades past — while studying the slender yet profound Itinerarium Mentis in Deum of St. Bonaventure, there arose in my mind a simple observation: “Thin books are dangerous.” By their brevity, they conceal depths which the unwary may mistake for shallows. By their compactness, they pierce more swiftly, and leave marks more enduring than tomes of a thousand pages.

The small variations presented below draw their form, though not their genius, from the fictions of Jorge Luis Borges — that master of mirrors, labyrinths, and forgotten libraries. If there is any virtue herein, it is owed to his example; if there is error, it is mine alone.

May the reader proceed with care, for the thinnest books, and perhaps the thinnest tales, are those most difficult to escape.

“The shortest books require the longest penance.”
— Anonymous marginal note, Biblioteca Laurenziana

I. The Library of Thin Books

In the city of Aram, whose streets no cartographer has ever agreed upon, there was once a secret library known only to a few scholars and fewer fools. It was said to contain the sum of human knowledge, but organized strangely: the thick books were shelved in dusty catacombs, seldom touched, while the thin books were kept in a bright chamber at the center, on shelves of polished cedar.

The Keeper of the Library explained this arrangement to all who entered: “The thick books are for forgetting. The thin books are for believing.”

Each thin book contained a single idea, expressed so perfectly that it resisted all argument. Sovereignty Belongs to the Strong was one book. The World is a Dream of the Gods was another. Still another was simply titled Obey.

Visitors who read the thick books emerged thoughtful and burdened, full of hesitations, counterexamples, and second thoughts. Visitors who read the thin books emerged transformed: resolute, fervent, certain.

Over time, it was not the heavy tomes that shaped Aram’s kings, priests, and scholars, but the thin volumes, read once and carried forever.

It is said that the city of Aram fell, not through invasion, nor famine, nor pestilence, but because, in the end, its citizens each lived by the idea of a different thin book, and could no longer understand one another.

The Library still stands, or so the story goes, though its doors are sealed and the books grow thinner by the century.

There is a final book, the thinnest of all, placed at the highest shelf where none but the Keeper can reach. It contains no words at all.

Its title is: Certainty.

⁂

II. The Shadows of the Books

There is a city — it does not matter which — where it is rumored that a second library exists beneath the great Library of Learned Tomes.

The surface library, the Library of Learned Tomes, is a noble place: its corridors are vast, its tomes heavy with ink and argument, and its readers slow, uncertain, weighed down by the burden of complexity. No truth is simple there; every assertion is marked and belied by a hundred footnotes, every conclusion bruised by rebuttal.

But below, beneath stone and time, there is another library. It is said to be vast but weightless. There, one finds only thin books — so thin they seem at times to flicker in the light, as if they might vanish.

Scholars, sensing the rumors, sometimes descend. They find books titled with dangerous simplicity: Justice is the Right of the Victorious, History is the Story We Tell Ourselves, The Future is Written.

Each thin book feels familiar. And well it should. For these thin books are the shadows of the thick books above¹: each vast, tangled treatise, compressed into a single, unassailable maxim.

The discovery at first seems marvelous. Why wrestle with a thousand pages when the essence can be grasped in a sentence? Why debate, when the answer can be carried in one’s pocket, ready for all occasions?

But the thin books are not summaries; they are distortions. They are what remains when doubt, nuance, and contradiction are stripped away. They are the husks of thought — seductive because they seem lighter, easier, final.

In time, those who read only the thin books come to mistrust the thick ones. They grow impatient with questions, contemptuous of ambiguity, zealous for a clarity that admits no appeal.

Some say that it was not neglect but the rise of the thin books that doomed the upper Library. That the heavy volumes grew dusty because the city’s rulers and citizens alike began to prefer the glimmer of certainty to the slow, earned labor of understanding.

In the end, the Library of Learned Tomes collapsed inward like a drained well. And the shadow library, weightless and triumphant, remained.

Somewhere, perhaps, it still remains.

Somewhere, perhaps, it is growing.

⁂

III. Coda: A Reflection in the Labyrinth

Some say that even the tale you have just read — the account of the thick and the thin, the surface and the shadow — is itself no more than a thin book: a single idea, polished to gleam, shorn of its necessary doubts.

If so, it is but one more glimmer in the labyrinth.

One more reflection upon reflections, cast by a candle already guttering.

One more danger to remember, and to forget.

IV. Scholium

¹ Cf. the lost Tractatus de Umbris Librorum (“Treatise on the Shadows of Books”), attributed to the forgotten scholar Balthasar of Istria (fl. late 13th century), who wrote: “The greater the volume, the more labyrinths it contains; the thinner the shadow it casts, the more swiftly it pierces the heart.” No complete manuscript survives, though fragments are said to be embedded in certain marginal glosses of the Biblioteca Laurenziana. Some dispute the existence of Balthasar himself, suggesting he is merely the invention of later compilers seeking to dignify their own thinness with the patina of lost antiquity.

Between Noise and Silence: On the Literal, the Metaphoric, and the Space Where Meaning Resides

**Rembrandt, “Philosopher in Contemplation” (1632). A quiet spiral of thought, descending into the hush between certainties.**

“The soul speaks most clearly when the tongue is still.”

There are days now, more frequent than before, when I find myself recoiling—not from people, exactly, but from a certain tone, a cast of mind. It is the literalists who unsettle me. Those who cling to the concrete as though it were the last raft afloat. The older I grow, with my silvered hair, the more their certainties feel not reassuring but menacing. It is not their knowledge I fear—it is their refusal to admit the unknown, the unspoken, the not-yet-understood.

And yet, I do not mean to dismiss the literal out of hand. I was trained in it. I lived among it. I applied law to facts with the solemn responsibility of rendering findings in civil rights complaints—decisions that shaped lives, guided by precedent, statute, regulation, policy, and the weight of written word. The literal is necessary. It is the groundwork. The shared foundation upon which meaning may be built. One must know the noise, the surface of things, before any deeper hearing is possible. Literalism is not, in itself, a failing. But to dwell in it wholly, to build a temple upon it without windows or doors—that is a failure of imagination and perhaps of courage.

There is something holy, or at least essential, in the gaps. The hush between words. The pause before reply. The silence that says more than any explanation could. It may be peace. It may be sorrow. It may be nothing at all—and that nothing may yet be everything.

The paradox thickens with age. I cannot dismiss the concrete—it is how we meet one another—but I also cannot abide those who live only by its rule. The world is not built entirely of clarity, nor is it meant to be. There is a path somewhere between the clamor and the silence, and perhaps I am only now beginning to find it.

The literal is our first tongue. It is how the child learns: this is a stone; that is a tree. Language builds the world we inhabit. And in that naming, in that first apprenticeship to the visible and the graspable, we are equipped with the tools to navigate life’s surfaces. We learn to classify, to divide, to act. It is a necessary scaffolding, even beautiful in its clarity.

But what follows—what truly shapes the soul—is what one does once that scaffolding has served its purpose. It is in the gaps, the silences, the places where the scaffolding falls away, that something more begins.

The darkness between the stars, or perhaps the light that filters through cracks in ancient stone, draws us to pause. It is not the substance, but the space between the substance, that calls us to deeper thought. The hush in a conversation—not the words, but the breath that precedes or follows them—can speak more profoundly than the speech itself. The crevice between certainties is where wonder slips in.

In these spaces we do not necessarily find answers. Sometimes we find transformative questions. Sometimes only presence. And sometimes only ourselves, which may be enough.

There is a wisdom in the void that no amount of noise can manufacture. Not the nihilism of meaninglessness, but the reverent recognition that meaning, like light, often travels best through emptiness.

To live entirely in the measured and known is to dwell in a museum of certainties—tidy, lifeless, unmoved. But to discard all that for a world of formless suggestion is to risk disappearance. The task is to dwell attentively in both: to know the stone as stone, and then sit long enough beside it to feel what it is not.

There are those who seek certainty in everything—in people, in relationships, in experiences, in outcomes. They crave contracts over conversation, definitions over dialogue. To them, ambiguity is a flaw, unpredictability a failure. But in securing themselves against uncertainty, they forfeit something essential. They miss the quickening of the heart in a half-spoken promise, the richness of a glance misunderstood, the poetry of a thing only half-comprehended but wholly felt.

To insist that the world always yield its meaning—immediately, exhaustively—is to mistake life for a mechanism. To live without risk, without the possibility of being undone or remade, is to refuse the privilege of being human.

And yet, those who flee entirely into mystery—who refuse form, who reject grounding—are no better served. Obscurity for its own sake is not wisdom but evasion. To veil oneself in metaphor to avoid responsibility is no more noble than to cling to literalism out of fear.

We are not machines. Nor are we vapor. We are, maddeningly and gloriously, both. We are flesh and thought, bone and breath, anchored and floating. And it is precisely in that stretch between—the literal and the allusive, the known and the unknown—that we are most fully human.

To demand certainty is to deny the thrill of becoming. To refuse structure is to forgo the beauty of its breaking. Somewhere in that middle space, between what can be said and what must be felt, is where the soul begins to sing.

And so we return to the hush. That space which is not absence but presence unspoken. The unanswered breath, suspended between question and reply, is not a failure of speech but its fulfillment. There, in that breath, we are closest to the truth—not because we grasp it, but because we cease grasping.

It is silence that answers most deeply. Not the silence of indifference, nor of ignorance, but the silence of presence—unadorned, uninsistent, abiding. The kind of silence that rests beside you like a companion who has nothing to prove. A silence that allows space for your own self to rise up, or dissolve, or simply be.

There are things that cannot be said, and yet are spoken in the pauses between words. There are truths that cannot be held, but are felt in the stillness between certainties. And perhaps the deepest form of knowledge is not in knowing, but in listening long enough to no longer need to.

The literal gives us form, but the silence between the forms gives us meaning. The prose of the world teaches us its names, but it is the poetry of its silences that teaches us our own.

I do not know if this is wisdom, or simply age. But I have come to suspect that the truest things—love, sorrow, grace, wonder—do not arrive in declarations. They appear instead in the gaps, in the long glances, in the word left unspoken. They arrive in silence. And in that silence—between noise and silence—we are not alone.