Just back from a faculty seminar. Dazzling presentation, kind of a "review-of-the-literature" show, young man with a brain as big as a suitcase whisks us in, out, over and around the topic with clever insights and wry, ironic asides at very turn. Question time makes it clear that he's about three steps ahead of his audience on almost any point one might want to pursue.
Time well spent; I enjoyed myself but I note in passing, that he kept saying "well, all the low hanging fruit has been picked." Yes, isn't that true in every discipline? We are at a stage where everybody knows the game, and knows that it is a game, so everything gets increasingly febrile and abstruse. Everybody speaks only to the initiated, and the number of self-contained circles tends to suppurate out over the landscape, like emanations in Plotinus. Time for a discontinuity, time for a new generation to discover a brand new frontier.
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