Books

 

'If I give out an empty book, meaning, "You cannot yet profit from my book', you will perhaps think, 'He is insulting me.'

But if I give out a full and understandable book, all readers will take its superficialities for their stimulation, exclaiming 'how magnificent, how profound'. People will follow these outward things after I am gone, making them a source of stimulation and debate. They will read didactics into them, or poetry, exercises or stories.

If I give out no books, or a small one, scholars will scoff and ruin the minds of potential and vulnerable students with alternative literature, even more than they do at present.

Baffled students become destructive, imagining solutions and then trying to impose them upon others.

If I give out a large book, some people will imagine that it is pretentious. All these suppositions are there, you notice, because they suit the people to have them, not because they are even likely to be true.

If I give out a cryptic book, people will imagine that it contains strange secrets. Or they may become unnecessarily artful through trying to understand it.