If you want to pile something up, it has to be the sort of thing that stays put. But what sort of thing stays put? I’ll tell you what sort of thing: a thing that’s not alive.
Living things— living virtues, living understandings— wriggle away, shed their skin, become unrecognizable. The understanding that I have called wisdom is living understanding. It lives in the mind. To make it stay put, you have to kill it, stuff it, taxidermy it. It looks the same at first, but it takes only a moment to see that something essential has been removed. It’s not an animal anymore. It’s a wall-hanging.
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