For someone to wish to really understand what you are saying and to work at pursuing that understanding — this is one of the greatest pleasures of life. It is pleasurable even when the understanding remains incomplete. The desire, and desire’s sole proof — action — is the source of pleasure.

To pursue understanding requires sacrifices of different kinds. First, and most obviously, understanding takes real effort, and the effort required increases with the strangeness of the concepts in question.

This sacrifice of effort leads directly to another more interesting sacrifice, one which is harder to explain: the more a person has understood and overcome strangeness in others, the stranger he himself becomes. So, the better he becomes at understanding other people’s crucial truths, the harder it becomes to understand what he means when he attempts to share his own most crucial truths.

Many people will find many uses for him, but his real use is locked away in his own strange understanding.

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There are many ways to love a “subject”. One can love a subject as a topic — as something about which someone is factually knowledgeable. Or a person can love a subject as a discipline — as an area one knows practically. To put it in Wittgenstein’s terms “one knows one’s way about” and loves manifesting it in effective action.

Finally, one can love his subject as a subject. The lover of a subject pursues his subject with his own subjectivity. He will shed bulk — even his treasured objective knowledge and his practical know-how — in order to slim down and lighten up enough to penetrate narrow passages and get ever closer to the unattainable point of his pursuit.

(One can love as an academic, a practitioner or a philosopher (philo “love”- sopher “wisdom”).

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It is unreasonable for someone who has understood too much to expect anyone to undertake understanding what he has understood.