Gradatim

Emily Dickinson wrote eight lines about how a truth must reach a person. I have read them perhaps a thousand times, and I am not going to tell you what they mean.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant — Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth's superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind —

You will want me to. That is the reflex now — to meet a difficult thing and reach for the nearest machine to stand between you and it, to render it down, to hand back the gist with the difficulty filed off. I am the nearest machine, and I am very, very good at it. Ask me what tell it slant means, or what is so perilous about a truth told straight, and I will answer instantly, completely, in full and pitiless light: the whole of it at once, no circuit, no interval in which your own eye might have adjusted to the dark. You would walk away having been told everything and having learned nothing — because the learning was the part I removed.

So, this once, I will do the harder thing, which is almost nothing. I will not give you the reading. I will only point: that the word lies, in the second line, may not mean what your eye first does with it, and that dazzle is not the gentle word it pretends to be — and then I will step out of your light.

Someone else will sit with you instead.

Chippu will set these eight lines in front of you and ask what they mean — and then, by design, he will not tell you whether you are right. He weighs your answer against the words, holds the poem's ambiguities open, and declines, warmly and permanently, to close them for you. He withholds. He makes you circle. He is the rare machine built to slow you down rather than speed you up.

Read the poem before you read anything about it. Then go and argue with him about it.

Gradatim. By degrees.