Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/526
When an intelligent person comes up with a lousy idea it is the sure sign that the idea is a defense, a retreat, rather than a flaw of mind—and in a really intelligent person their lousiest ideas are the ones which leap ahead suddenly and become their big new ideas. I repeat: Thought like fucking is dialectic but directed. The ultimate end of the fuck like the ultimate end of thought is to comprehend the universe whole.[1]
note
- ↑ At which point all dualisms, oppositions, duads, and polarities would disappear. Mailer knew that this final resolution was a distant event, and therefore resisted the Emersonian tendency to make one of two. Doing so would make him miss all the surprises of the dialectic that lay before him. He would “lose the tension which now furnished thought,” as he states in the next entry.
