But just recently you told me you were burning to write it.
Yeah, but I got to thinking that chess actually matters more to me.
It seems to me you don't know what you want — you have no goal.
I just have a lot of them, and I have to divide my time between them. Sometimes I get stuck on one a little longer.
You need to focus on a single thing, otherwise you'll achieve nothing.
So you're a Christian. And what's a Christian's goal?
To live with Christ, I suppose, maybe even to become a saint.
And how's that going? Have you ever thought that the path matters more than the result?
Not going great, to be honest.
I'll go further: the more real your progress, the more self-effacing your discourse becomes.
True — I see more of my own sins.
There you go, and so you start working on yourself even harder. It turns out your discourse runs in the opposite direction from the goal, yet it helps you reach it. And vice versa: reaching the goal intensifies the discourse. Having a single goal says nothing about a person's drive — it can just as well be a sign of dim-wittedness. Failing to reach any goal at all can be a sign that a person is passionate about many things.
Then where's the invariant? What do you lean on if you have many goals?
In the broad sense you don't need anything to lean on, but in the narrow sense you can lean on the desire to strive, on the fire in your eyes — even if it points in a different direction every time.
So inside each of us there's a constant struggle of several desires?
Yes, we're a “desiring machine,” essentially a broth in which our desires boil; from time to time one of them rises to the surface, then sinks back to the bottom, and as long as we're alive it keeps boiling — in some more fiercely, in others more faintly, some with few desires, some with many.
And is there any way to focus on a single desire?
Then you'd have to cut off the rest. It's like a monk, or an alcoholic. You'd do better to ask how to add desires to the machine.
So, chess for now?
Yes, and I'll come back to the dissertation later.