how could it be that the person who pursues “only money” participates more in the divine than the person who pursues “only divinity” — (because he’s pursued it rightly.) (I do consider, for example, that the person who pursues money for money’s sake is a more serious person, divinely or eternally considered, than the one who pursues religion for money’s sake.)
and you would also consider the person who pursues money to be more poetic than the one who pursues poetry provided he does it more “correctly” (mind, he doesn’t pursue money more poetically than the poet does poetry, but only more correctly, whatever that may mean, maybe what you mean is that he prefers it “for its own sake”) — (when you put it like that I’m less sure, I admit)
Well, certainly you don’t mean to say something like this: that the greatest general is also the greatest poet or that the greatest computer programmer is also the greatest plumber, something of that kind? (–certainly not–) On the other hand, you do somewhat wonder if the greatest poet might have been the greatest plumber if he had only put his mind and talents to plumbing instead of to poetry, is that right (– yes –) and on top of this you are thinking that there is something good and artful about anything that is done well, whether it be a computer program, an epic poem, or a septic tank repair; so that if a computer program is done very well it is not only a good computer program but also a better poem than a poem which is done poorly, or (no that can’t be right) but… more poetic than a poorly done poem? (…) What I mean is, when the military general or the plummer and programmer performs his craft well, when what they’re doing comes together just right, as you say, there is something good and poetic about that, although it’s not poetry or goodness per se — is that right? Is that what you’d expressed?
Well, I’m thinking now about a criminal. Is there anything good and beautiful about a perfectly executed crime, about what they call the ‘perfect crime’? I’m sorry this is something a little different I’m thinking of. To answer my own question I suspect not. I suspect not, but I can not say why exactly. I feel I might say what a good crime might be but I can not say yet what a perfect crime would involve. A good crime would involve disobedience to an unjust law, I think: the refusal, for example, to kill or punish an innocent person. Or taxes and Thoreau. But ‘the perfect crime’, all morals aside, seems merely to involve having a plan of some complexity. Right, don’t we generally think of diamond heists, art thieves and so on, or rather maybe we should be careful to say, don’t we generally think of movies of diamond heists and of thieves dressed in black hanging from ropes above floors covered with laser beams and weight sensitive plates. Perhaps ‘the perfect crime’ as it would occur in reality, that is, instead of in a movie, would be more a sort of mysterious disappearance than an actual heist, a totally traceless vanishing of a thing. We would never know if somebody took it or if it had just disappeared and maybe no one knew it was there or guessed that it was of any value. Maybe the truly perfect crime wouldn’t be a crime at all: maybe it would be a kind of joke? Or that crime is by its nature an imperfection — the holocaust, a blundering stab for something, Crime and Punishment (But I like what you just said: that crime, to be perfect, should not be a kind of theft or murder or what have you, which are too serious in the end to be perfect, but a joke)
What do you think a cubist or modernist version of a platonic dialogue would be like? It would be like a regular, spoken conversation I mean what would it look like if you wrote it down,
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 
