Ho ho! So much for our intellectual ambitions of yesterday! Did we forget that the Fool is of the airy element no less than the Ace of Swords? The Fool is of course “airy” in the sense of nonchalant or flippant. He seems to have plucked the white rose and the laurel bough from yesterday’s Ace of Swords and made off with them!
So let us also make away with folly by applying the sword of logic:
If folly is bad, it must be harmful.
But who is harmed by folly, the wise or the foolish?
Not the wise, or else they would not be wise.
What about the fools?
Not so! for a fool, neither folly nor any consequent harm is evident to him. And what is not evident to one cannot be harmful to him. Fools take their own judgement to be more valid than anybody else’s, and therefore, seeing no harm suffer none.
If you attempt to tell me that you may be harmed by another’s folly, I say again, it cannot be so. For you are harmed not by another’s folly, but by your own lack of wisdom. For the wise always avoid the folly of others. And the fool, when aware of some damage to himself, will always blame another.
Therefore be gladsome today, oh wayfarer, for the wayfaring man, though a fool, cannot err in his own judgement of the path that he stumbles along.
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