Selected Aphorisms #11

The eleventh installment in our sticktoitive new series.

A certain type of reader might criticize these aphorisms for not being serious enough. That seems to be a quality about which people are really concerned these days: to be taken seriously, to do serious work, to be serious-minded about their futures. Meanwhile, you got Plato over here going, “Man is a plaything in the hand of God, and truly this is the best thing about him.” Personally, I don’t know what to think, so I says to myself, I says, “Who’m I going to listen to: the Father of Western Thought or a hypothetical reader I invented for the sake of  argument?” Asking a question like that is an effective method for discerning one’s real thoughts on a matter. Replace method with device in the previous sentence, and it means almost exactly the same thing.