Enough of this. Enough. Equivocal or vague principles, as a rule, will make your life an uninspired, undirected, and meaningless act.

This is taken from Alphabetical Diaries, a remarkable book I am reading by Sheila Heti, composed of many thousands of sentences drawn from her decades of diaries and presented in alphabetical order. It starts like this:

A book about how difficult it is to change, why we don’t want to, and what is going on in our brain. A book can be about more than one thing, like a kaleidoscope, it can have man things that coalesce into one thing, different strands of a story, the attempt to do several, many, more than one thing at a time, since a book is kept together by the binding. A book like a shopping mart, all the selections. A book that does only one thing, one thing at a time. A book that even the hardest of men would read. A book that is a game. A budget will help you know where to go.

How does a simple, one might even say cheap, technique, one might even say gimmick, work so well? I thrill to the aphorisms even when I don’t believe them, as with the aphorism above: principles must be equivocal or at least vague to work as principles; without the necessary vagueness they are axioms, which are not good for making one’s life a meaningful act, only good for arguing on the Internet. I was reading Alphabetical Diaries while I walked home along the southwest bike path. I stopped for a minute and went up a muddy slope into the cemetery where there was a gap in the fence, and it turned out this gap opened on the area of infant graves, graves about the size of a book, graves overlaying people who were born and then did what they did for a week and then died — enough of this.