There is a long tradition in civilization of the itinerant intellectual, knocking about, scrounging loose change to keep on keeping on, there and not there. I have a character in my Vella story, The Tao of the Swarm, who is such a person. I call him the Cheshire catman because he has a tendency to fade into the woodwork when nobody's saying anything interesting and suddenly appearing in all his intellectual glory when someone is.
The character is close to home. I am such a person. My formative years were spent reading in the Encyclopedia Britannica when I wasn't hunting ideas out of novels. I determined in those years to be the next Aristotle. That's an impossible goal. Aristotle consumed the ancient Library and, in his works, organized the whole intellectual enterprise into coherence. Our Library is too large for a project of that nature. That grandiose ambition saved me from a lifetime of self-reproach. When one does not do what is impossible one does not fail. One simply does not succeed.
Will and Ariel Durant attempted to bring the history of the world into intellectual coherence a la Aristotle. They did a workmanlike job of a piece of work that was wildly ambitious. They did not, by any means, fail. They just didn't particularly succeed. They were not such an intellect as Aristotle with such a comprehensible Library. They were doomed from the start.
The problem in our times, the 20th and 21st centuries, is that precisely the occupations, for lack of a better word, that literally feed itinerant intellectuals are being automated. The adding machine destroyed a niche in banks that fed many a bright, hungry mind and replaced them with leggy blondes with keyboard skills. It becomes harder by the day to simply eat as such a person.
Perhaps the Basic Income will solve this problem once funding issues are resolved. Perhaps itinerant intellectuals will once again roam the earth with gloriously outsized ambitions like Cheshire cats, like the wind, there and not there.
Do Well and Be Well.
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