A Confederacy Of Dunces

I've read this book a while back. Took me a few tries to actually finish it because the beginning was so bloody boring. I kept reading the notes on the back cover about how brilliant this author was, this John Kennedy Toole, who won the Pulitzer for this book post mortem. If not for his mother's continous struggle to get someone worthy to read it, he would have been probably forgotten in the mists of time.

The man who did finally read it, and promote it, had the same problem as me: before the second half of the book he got so bored, he was ready to trash the John's name for writting such a lousy book. The point is that everybody is open to failure because everybody feels the need to express an opinion on spot. We're probably afraid not to lose our trail of thought or our brilliant comment that we prepare in that second just to hit someone over the face with it.

Oscar Wilde said that "only shallow people don't judge by appearances". That's right, a better analysis will prove that content and form are both equally important. Still, the brilliant author never mentioned that this scanning of people or objects or situations has to be done thoroughly so that the assessment can be as accurate and objective as possible. 'Tis strange... They teach a lot of methods in school, but they don't say anything about focusing on the whole and not just the part that captures the eye. And I tend to believe that that is a massive problem on a global scale; if people showed more insight and focused on the message more, a lot of world-wide issues could be solved. Alas, we are imbeciles!

As my lie experiment goes on, I realize how much bullshit can people come up with. It's not shocking, but it is amusing. Most people would make up any lie just to cover their ass and even go to lengths that I didn't believe possible. A few years back, a collegue of mine actually swore to one of our professors that his grandparents had a horrible accident. Or were there two? Anyhow, he said that his grandmother died in a fire and after that his grandfather had a horrible car accident that left him without legs. Just an excuse for his lack of study and some emo crap to feed a professor who was about to fail him. Which is exactly what happened, even though he seemed to actually believe the guy.

I wonder what kind of lie would a person like this come up with if something ten times more important would come up. Most importantly and worrying is the fact that he lied with such conviction, in a more serious situation he's likely to appear as a saint even though he just killed a dozen people.

So basically, there are two kinds of people: liars and dunces. Liars can be dunces when it comes to certain matters, but the other way around is nearly impossible because dunces make lousy liars. Of course, there's a third party involved, as always, but those shall remain unnamed. They fit into no category and can not be labeled. Funny though how the other two try to copy that, don't you think?

Well, to all my cats out there, pardon the english exercise. This was a promise made to Spooky, my australian Tauren-player godmother who's checking out my blog now and then. Have a nice day, y'all and "For the Horde!"