Paradox reveals the full measure of its beauty when you understand the link between Noein and Poiesis — between the act of thinking and the act of making. Because the best embodiment of paradox is style. That kind of style that says:

Because of too much black, I whitened.
Because of too much sun, I fell to night.
Because of too much life, I over-died.

In the tension between paradox and style, thought becomes exuberance and creative force, restlessness and seeking — and an insatiable hunger for more.

And when paradox finds artistic form, something remarkable happens:
Truth becomes a figure of speech, and uniqueness transforms into miraculous multiplicity.

I had been nevering before you begun.
Too much yes had no-ed me.
Too much sky had grounded my wings.

I once was rainless in the middle of falling.
Once sunblind from under the soil.
Once unborn from remembering you.

I am still.
But still is leaving me.

In the presence of paradox as principle, singularity becomes abundance;
and the world, once a “something,” becomes “nothing.”

Which leads me to my own definition of being human:

“In trying to escape the condition of being a paradox, man ends up affirming himself as the most complex paradox of all — thus becoming the Unman.”

Or an even shorter definition:
“By fleeing the fate of being a paradox, man becomes its most intricate expression — the Unman.“

And this is my favorite Unman — poetic and noetic, coherent in its contradictions, enamored with adversity itself.
A being who loses itself only when it goes in search of itself; who discovers wisdom at the very moment it understands it can never be possessed; who merges with all only by embracing its nothingness; who fulfills itself through self-renunciation.
Perfect — because it has contemplated its own imperfection for a lifetime.

Which, of course, makes sense — and undoes itself.
Is true — and endlessly untrue.

Whether we are chemists or programmers, fashion designers or folk artists, our minds operate through paradox and figures of speech: rhythm and verse, gradation and lament, metonymy and synecdoche.
This is what makes truth eloquent — regardless of the field in which it chooses to reveal itself.

That is why Nietzsche is as relevant as a scientist, why Niels Bohr can be read as a philosopher, and James Clerk Maxwell may be admired as a musician of extraordinary precision.

In a kind of retroactive consequence, Poiesis — that primal act of creation through which something came into being for the very first time — is not merely where truth begins to speak, but the shape truth assumes when it dares to exist.

Which means that our universe is the Supreme Exercise in Style — the sum of all acts of creation, past, present, and still to come.

That is why Nature inspires.

Yes, the universe may be decoded by a mathematician —
but only by one who understands The Art of the Fugue,
and the beauty of lines like:

“Ein Gott vermag. Wie aber, sag mir, soll
ein Mann ihm folgen durch die schmale Leier?
Sein Sinn ist Zwiespalt. An der Kreuzung zweier
Herzwege steht kein Tempel für Apoll.”

The Theory of Everything — of Totality — will be a mathematics that bears the sublimity of a Bach score and the measured elegance of David’s psalms.

Which is why I propose we begin first — in school — with Bach and King David,
and only then proceed to mathematics and chemistry.

I believe the key to untying all our knots lies in words such as these:

“You are so beautiful, winter!
The field stretched on its back beneath the horizon,
and the trees halted by the fleeing wind —
My nostrils tremble,
and there is no scent,
no breeze,
only the distant scent of ice
from vanished suns.”