Many people out there — more than you think — inhabit private worlds stocked with behaving automatons. Some of these automatons refuse to behave in an orderly and comprehensible manner. You may have been an automaton to one of these people at some point.

If such a person finds your behavior unintelligible, he (rarely is it a she) will impose intelligibility.

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Powerful solipsists make rules to enforce their solipsism.

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Some rules exist for the sake of the individual.

Some rules exist for the sake of the group.

Some rules exist for the sake of the institution.

Some rules exist for the sake of the ruler.

But most rules exist for the sake of staving off anxieties, or for annihilating perplexities.

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Perplexities are annihilated through retreat. The surest way to destroy something new is to impose something old.

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If you want a newly conceived and vulnerable idea to vanish without a trace, subject it to interrogation from an old and alien line of thought.

At first, words will fail the idea.

Then memory will fail it.

Then faith will fail it.

Then words will betray it.

Now the idea is a palimpsest on virgin paper.

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Yeat’s ghosts mortally feared forgetting themselves in the misunderstanding of mediums.