Against Convenience

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“Every good question is a door; learning is the courage to open it.”

In the great electric morning,  
when the little silver prophets hum in our pockets  
and the machine, with its clean white teeth,  
offers us a thousand answers  
before we have framed the question—

I praise the old, rebellious art  
of making a mind.

Not the merely stuffed mind,  
not the museum of facts  
where dusty labels sleep under glass,  
but the agile mind,  
the lantern-hand,  
the mind that turns in the dark  
and recognizes its own room.

For what is intelligence now,  
but the fashionable surrender  
of thought to convenience?  
We ask the oracle,  
and it replies in fluent certainty;  
we nod, relieved,  
as if being spared the effort  
were the same thing as being enlightened.

Ah, but the course—  
that modest, practical sermon  
in an age of miracles—  
whispers a heresy:  
that learning is not consumption,  
but cultivation;  
not download, but labor;  
not speed, but structure.

It teaches the ancient scandal  
that concentration can be practiced,  
that memory may be courted,  
that confusion is not a moral failure  
but often the toll booth  
on the road to understanding.

And what a joke, really,  
that in the century of artificial thought  
we must be reminded  
how to think naturally—  
as if the soul had gone out of style  
and needed reintroducing  
to its own habits.

So let the algorithms sing.  
Let them enumerate, predict, recommend.  
Meanwhile I will keep  
the awkward human ceremony  
of becoming less foolish.

I will build my faculties  
like a stubborn house against weather.  
I will learn slowly,  
with irony in one pocket  
and discipline in the other.  
And if the future is managed by machines,  
let it at least be inhabited  
by minds that know  
how not to kneel.