edaniel

The hearing a speech in Parliament, drawled or stammered out by the Honourable Member or the Noble Lord, the ringing the changes on their common-places, which any one could repeat after them as well as they, stirs me not a jot, shakes not my good opinion of myself: but seeing the Indian Juggler does. It makes me ashamed of myself. I ask what there is that I can do as well as this? Nothing. What have I been doing all my life? Have I been idle, or have I passed my time in pouring words like water into empty sieves, rolling a stone up a hill and then down again, trying to prove an argument in the teeth of facts, and looking for causes in the dark, and not finding them? Is there no one thing in which I can challenge competition, that I can bring as an instance of exact perfection, in which others cannot find flaw? The utmost I can pretend to is to write a description of what this fellow can do. I can write a book: so can many others who have not even learned to spell. ... I am fond of arguing: yet with a good deal of pains and practice it is often as much as I can do to beat my man; though he may be a very indifferent hand. A common fencer would disarm his adversary in the twinkling of an eye, unless he were a profesor like himself. A stroke of wit will sometimes produce this effect, but there is no such power or superiority in sense or reasoning.

-William Hazlitt, from "The Indian Jugglers," 1821.

The omnipresent fight between intellectual and manual excellence. The only way to truly approach a vague semblance of perfection is to at least be proficient in both, which is an idea long forgotten in American culture. We laud Washington and his chopping down a tree, Lincoln and his splitting wood for fences, etc, but how many public figures today can actually show a balance between these two halves of human existence? How many can show basic proficiency in either, let alone both? Not too fucking many.