The skeptical essay having the most relevance to culture-at-large may be McEvilley's 1991, "I Am Is A Vain Thought".
Mallarmé spoke of the uncertainty with which we face a clean sheet of paper and try, in vain, to record our thoughts on it with some precision.
If such a thought were vain, to me it yet remains the breath of life itself, greater than grief and lonelier than a cloudless sky.
That is, you talk for ninety seconds, and then pause out of necessity when the cars whiz by again, trying in vain to hold a thought as your teeth vibrate.
That's the spirit we need these days to dispel the fog bank of foggy banking, and not the poet's contrary second thoughts beginning "Hence, vain deluding Joys".
While I was struggling in vain to write down my thoughts, a helpful friend asked, "Well, if George were here, what would he think?" And my first reaction was, George would have been furious with himself for dying during both the Olympics and an exciting presidential election: how could he and his friends possibly be the center of attention when everyone is relentlessly focused elsewhere?
…in truth, the turkey is in comparison a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America…He is, besides (thought a little vain and silly, it is true, but not the worse emblem for that), a bird of courage, and would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his farmyard with a red coat on.
The thought of wrecked Lou vain ?
Everything we've been working for -- democracy, freedom of thought -- all seems in vain". She may be wrong.
They revealed everything -- Malia's candid thoughts on her teacher ("feckless, vain, and ineffective") as well as who she liked, who she like liked, and her list of frenemies.
