خاتمه

Epilogue

What Lindy Told Me

Now, reader, comes the end of the journey—and a fifth installment of the Incerto. So while trying to summarize the book, with the obligatory distillation, I saw the reflection of my face in a restaurant’s mirror: dominated by a whitish beard, and a defiant East-Med (East Mediterranean) Greco-Phoenician pride in aging. It was more than two and a half decades ago that I put pen to paper for the Incerto, before my beard turned gray. Lindy was telling me that, for a certain class of things, I had less to prove, less to explain, and less to theorize. I had overheard someone in the restaurant saying emphatically, “It is what it is,” and the phrase kept repeating itself in my head.

No summary this time, no summary anymore. Per Lindy: When the beard (or hair) is black, heed the reasoning, but ignore the conclusion. When the beard is gray, consider both reasoning and conclusion. When the beard is white, skip the reasoning, but mind the conclusion.

So let me finish this book with a (long) maxim, via negativa style: No muscles without strength, friendship without trust, opinion without consequence, change without aesthetics, age without values,

life without effort,

water without thirst,

food without nourishment, love without sacrifice, power without fairness, facts without rigor,

statistics without logic, mathematics without proof, teaching without experience, politeness without warmth, values without embodiment, degrees without erudition, militarism without fortitude, progress without civilization, friendship without investment, virtue without risk,

probability without ergodicity, wealth without exposure, complication without depth, fluency without content, decision without asymmetry, science without skepticism, religion without tolerance, and, most of all:

nothing without skin in the game.

And thank you for reading my book.