What’s held to be good, to be best [concentration is held to be good] What’s held to be bad [distraction is held to be bad], but isn’t that as much as to say, activity is good but resting is bad? [it might, which wouldn’t be correct.]
*
Experimenter of life. “Many experiments turn out badly, in the sense that they offer no instruction, come to no definite conclusion; and this is even more often the case with the so-called ‘experimenter of life’.” Was the “experiment of your life” run properly and, as it were, scientifically? [I.e., was it a well conducted experiment? Was it conducted by a trained scientist?]
[Reply a: I never said I conducted an “experiment of my life”, with my life. Reply b: I never admitted the notion that “all lives are such an experiment”. Reply c: Can’t say whether yes or no but suspect no. Reply d: I can say definitely no.. Reply e: I can say certainly that “the experiment of my life” did not result in a definite conclusion of life that I now know about.]
*
A bad scientist, a poor experiment “I’ll admit I was a bad scientist, that the experiment was poor,” “I’ll certainly entertain the idea that what I call an experiment a proper scientist would not think of as such.” It was an experiment in which some mistake had been made, some important data point had been lost, the spread sheet improperly filled in; and yet so much had gone into it, there had been so much money spent on it at that point, that some good story needed to be made about the flawed data that had been gathered. “Flawed meaningless data is the result of the ‘experiment of my life.'” (Or, more positively expressed, it was an important reconfirmation of known principles as to how properly to conduct experiments, which were unfortunately not followed in this case, leading to a complete loss of all data.) There had also never been a clear methodology –or rather, there had been one that I never became conscious of.
*
What is meant then, “experimenter of life” in what sense [sense of making a departure from the mode of life one’s upbringing suggested.] (Perhaps my peers or school mates or siblings offer the ‘control’, or perhaps I am the ‘control.’ — perhaps I’m the control that wasn’t as constant as it was intended to have been — perhaps I was the faulty control that ruined the experiment of the lives of my peers– the lives of my peers– perhaps I was a constant flawed aspect of the experiment of my generation. Perhaps it was a “double-blind” experiment ). Perhaps I was to have been a leader among my peers, but failed to be. But did I do something or did I just ‘let go’? Did I just, when it became my own choice, start falling? [Is that how it happened?] [Conclusion: I did “do something” yet rather suspect it is “less real” than the thing that I let go of. –“I Fell.” The flapping of one’s arms being less real than gravity] to say that one must be realistic in the face of real things
*
GENERAL PHILOSOPHY. [General philosophy is of “hypothetical radical equality”] [hypothetical because provisional; provisional because untried, immoderate, impractical –but also because “we are what we come from” the situation we’re born into and very little of what we elect] [it stressed about that “because of Smerdyakov” and what the meaning of that figure might impart here]– that the highest and the lowest both should be treated with the respect owed to the highest (or the midmost) [maybe what is midmost is highest — an arch — the divine average, etc.] — as a general matter, people should be granted a respect greater than our judgment of them alone would impart
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 