If, as I write this entry on a laptop actually on my lap, zapping a future generation from my gonads, I were to tell you that people are utterly predictable, what would you say? You disagree? Let me assure you, then, that your disagreement is informed strictly by certain inherited, and perhaps cherished, biases of yours. You are not being completely honest with yourself. You're instantiating what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu termed meconaissance -- strategic misrecognition or avoidance of truths undeniably before us, a conspiracy of the intentionally, wilfully purblind in the interest of keeping greased the wheels of social intercourse. A thousand little lies shape your day, which would be quite different were those lies to become truths.
I, for instance, know precisely why my ex-wife left me -- though I will not disclose the reason why to you, cher lecteur (Extend to me a little meconaissance, won't you?). I thought about it at length today, as I have thousands of times before, and with each time the reasons grow increasingly undeniable. Now, the funny thing is, knowledge of the truth rarely comes with the sparing of your feelings. Hence the need for meconnaisance in the first place: feelings are of paramount importance, especially now. You draw more flies with honey than vinegar, after all.
You will, however, enjoy a certain flinty grace if you are able to be honest with yourself and are unwilling to settle for explanations -- typically rationalizations -- born of meconaissance. This grace comes in the form of a certain obduracy which allows you for a moment to regard the universe not as the medium of beneficent Providence, but rather as the indifferent void it truly is. This grace allows you to say with bitterness, but without self-pity, "I will be alive for a time and I will not be alive for a far greater time; my complaints, therefore, truly are just the 'sound and fury' of which Shakespeare's Macbeth speaks."
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