"THE road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom," wrote William Blake.
The Proverbs, also called The Book Of Proverbs, an Old Testament book of "wisdom" writing found in the third section of the Jewish canon, known as the Ketuvim, or Writings.
It was to be about "Book M," a likely apocryphal Rosicrucian encyclopedia of arcane wisdom written, in the early fifteenth century, in "magical language and letters" by Christian Rosenkreuz and the seven other founders of the order.
Every morning I click on ABC's The Note for a near-killer dose of right-leaning conventional political wisdom written with enough cutesy faux-clever asides to choke a horny corndog, or something.
A victim, Trev-Mun, authof of a comic called Ragnarok Wisdom, wrote: "I got the impression that they enjoyed this kind of thing as a kid enjoys kicking down others' sandcastles".
At those moments, with the rush of passion for the overthrow of Mr. Hussein, against the troops that did it, Westerners in Iraq sometimes feel tempted to reach for reflections on Arab culture in books like "Seven Pillars of Wisdom," written in the 1920's by T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia.
Pitchfork Media reviewer James P. Wisdom wrote that "Dr. Octagonecologyst is a fun-house ride in hell.
"Pain comes from the darkness / And we call it wisdom," writes Randall Jarrell.
"The commonality linking all of the consignors involved is their strong character and sense of wisdom," writes the auction house.
But even then, what these books actually do is make you realize that much of the wisdom written in those pages are principles we inwardly already know.
