About

Contrarian

con·trar·i·an \kən-ˈtrer-ē-ən, kän-\

noun.

: a person who takes an opposite or different position or attitude from other people

: a person who takes an opposing view, especially one who rejects the majority opinion

adj.

: disagreeing with or proceeding against current or established practice

In the heart of what is notably called the formative years, I happened upon a letter that was not specifically addressed to me. It would be wrong to classify the words I read as advice or warning, or even reinforcement. Nevertheless, a relationship formed vis–à–vis the page that would no more inform my thoughts than the letter itself had informed its author. I was directed to no place that I did not already desire to go. We must not simply say that oxygen was given to a flame.

It would be far better to call a spade a spade. After all, it was discovered some time before that day I was impertinent to consensus. It had long become impossible to rise and breathe without steadily perforating the stilted notions held by neighbors. I was not looking for a license, and the author, for his part, did not offer a sweeping bargain. He merely did with skill the only thing a person should do with the things they learn: gather them all together and scatter it all across a trail. Here I found an exacting conscience on the page that left no doubt as to my condition. I was witness to an essay diagnosing my own dissimilar self. It was euphoric to find a scribe at the end of those amassing years.

An off-kilter mathemetics professor once appealed to his class: “Where do the cars meet?” His class knowingly replied that distance is found by rate and time. They asked him to provide quantities of the opposing forces and the corresponding rates of speed. At what precise point will the cars meet? The figures provided to the students are no longer of consequence. It is enough to know that from a fixed position, as the universe continues its seemingly random course, two objects hurling toward one another will eventually come to a marvelous head. The only difficult determination is time. As you lower yourself down to the base of a brimming tub the bathwater rises steadily, only until it overflows. And there could be no drought in the mind of either man severe enough to halt this meeting. This would be the life and the method and we would ruffle the world in tandem.

It has been called a spark. Unfortunately, a spark is too often awarded the talents of a prime mover. The spark is surely too far down the causal chain. What would the particles say? On the road of scholarship and for the value of delving deep, we should periodically feel obliged to update our state of affairs. This blog will consist of the incandescent elements that move chemicals to conversation. I will impede ignorance at the conclusion of learning, and aspire to laughter when I can muster wit. Most of all, I will seek the core of our feeble conceptions, however great they are in force or number. In the hope that near the end I can offer compensation to the man I met along the way, I will ready a fist and percuss any threat man finds to his reason. We must make sense were sense can be made, the remainder of the time we must flail and heave our frame against the tide of credulity.

“Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence.” —Christopher Hitchens