Harristotelian Logic

Discovery is not easy.

I am telling you from experience that in terms of stress, and having to push yourself, fighting for every inch, never knowing quite which way is up, or down, there is nothing like the search for truth.

Being wrong is easy, knowing when you're right can be hard, but actually being right and knowing it, is the hardest thing of all.

When it comes to a sports analogy that applies, I think the best is baseball.

You lose most of the time, as a hitter in baseball.

Most of the time, you don't get that homerun.

Most of the time, when you go up to that plate, with that anticipation, the adrenaline surging, all those plans for beating that pitcher beating through your mind—you lose.

You go up—then, you sit back down, and you get to think about it, one more time.

But, you have to get up again, sometime later—if you're lucky—and go up, one more time, against another set of pitches, and try again.

Discovery is like baseball.

You lose most of the time. You learn to feel that pain in your gut. To feel that disappointment from yourself and people watching, and know that you will go back up again, one more time—God willing.

It's not about whether or not you hit that ball. But that you got up there, and you tried, God help you, you tried because that's what you do.

I'm at the end of my run. Mathematics is a young man's game, so far, and hopefully, it'll be a young person's game soon enough, as it's past time for a woman to step up, and I am looking for her.

But for now, it's a young man's game and as I'm past 35 I am well past my prime, and my time is over.

But, in my time, when I had my big dreams, I could step up, swing a lot, miss a lot, and keep dreaming, as I knew I didn't have to connect all that many times, as in mathematics, your homeruns, well, they last, forever.

I am retired. The spirit has died. The Muse has left me. I don't feel any more discovery is left in these bones.

But I look back, and no matter what anyone else says, no matter who calls me "crazy" or a "loon" or a "crackpot" or a "crank", I stepped up to the plate, and I hit some homeruns.

Feeling really old now. Well past my prime, and I had just enough energy for one last go at it.

The deeds are done. Now I can just think back and remember the hard days, the painful days, when nothing was right, when there seemed to be nothing but pain and misery, the laughter and the taunting, all that hurt from people I never met and never want to meet, when all I could think of was that nothing, nothing in this world was going to stop me, because there was nothing else I could do, but win.