On the Subtle Art of Seeming Foolish

There is, in our time, an almost feverish compulsion to appear clever. We esplanade our education, lace our sentences with fashionable jargon, and measure our worth by the applause of those who recognise our wit. Yet, what is seldom recognised—indeed, what is most often despised—is that peculiar and paradoxical gift: the ability of the truly intelligent man to play the fool.

At first glance, this may sound like cowardice, or worse, duplicity. Why should a man of quick understanding conceal his sharpness beneath the mask of simplicity? The answer lies in a truth too seldom acknowledged: a mind that is always eager to display itself learns little of the world. Like a torch too bright, it blinds its own bearer. The man who wishes to know men must, at times, dim his light, so that others, thinking themselves unobserved, may reveal their colours.

Consider the fisherman with his bait. He does not fling his net with violent haste, declaring to the fish his every intention. He waits, motionless, almost invisible. It is not the force of his strength, but the art of his disguise, that brings his quarry to hand. So it is with the wise man who feigns ignorance: he becomes, to the vain and the proud, an easy prey. They rush to correct him, to teach him, to patronise him—and in so doing, they spill forth their secrets and betray their inner selves. He, all the while, is listening.

There are, I think, four distinct treasures buried in this art. First, the mask of simplicity permits us to behold the unvarnished truth of others. Men are never so unguarded as when they believe themselves to be the master in the room. Second, it allows one to play the fool in order to catch the fool; for nothing ensnares the egotistical like the belief that they are cleverer than their company. Third, it is a key to hidden knowledge: people will pour out information when convinced that their listener is harmlessly naïve. Fourth, it awakens in others the ancient instinct to instruct, to explain, to guide—and from this impulse flows a harvest of wisdom that no interrogation could have wrung.

It is worth noticing the asymmetry here. A clever man may don the garb of simplicity, but a simpleton cannot with any success impersonate intelligence. The one is like an actor who, knowing the whole play, can perform any part. The other has no script at all, and thus cannot rise beyond the narrow limits of his own mind.

The danger, of course, lies in excess. There is a thin line between strategic humility and the permanent habit of belittling one’s own gifts. To make oneself a fool for a moment is astuteness; to become one, for fear of seeming conceited, is cowardice. The object is not to deceive for vanity’s sake, but to learn, to protect, and at times to correct by indirection.

History gives us many examples, but let one suffice. When Odysseus, that cunning king of Ithaca, entered Troy disguised as a beggar, he was scorned, mocked, and overlooked. Yet, beneath that cloak of rags lay a mind calculating every word, weighing every gesture, until at last he triumphed where brute force had failed. It was not by trumpeting his percipience that he prevailed, but by cloaking it in foolishness.

We might do well to remember that the wisest teachers, prophets, and saints often spoke in parables—simple tales of seeds and sheep, which the proud dismissed as childish. Yet hidden in that humble dress lay truths that have outlived empires.

The world, then, is a theatre in which the wise man need not always insist on playing Hamlet. Sometimes, it is better—far better—to play the fool.

No one arrives unbroken.
We all drag something behind us—
a limp of the spirit,
a private ache,
a habit of wounding and being wounded in return.
Those who claim otherwise are either young,
or lying with remarkable confidence.

There is no such thing as easy company.
There are only varieties of difficulty:
the silent sort who corrodes a room by absence,
the volatile sort who shatters it by noise,
the charming sort who costs you years
before the invoice is presented in full.

So when—by some statistical aberration—
you meet a person who stays.
Not clinging.
Not performing loyalty like a public virtue.
But staying with the unglamorous labour of understanding—
listening past your first explanation,
returning after the argument has cooled into embarrassment,
choosing clarification over theatrics—
recognise the gravity of the moment.

This is not romance.
This is eternity.

Such people do not fall from the sky.
They are forged—
by loss, by disappointment, by having once loved foolishly
and learned, at cost,
how not to repeat the crime.

Do not let the crowd dismantle this.
Friends who mistake familiarity for wisdom,
family who sanctify tradition over truth,
voices that say blood is thicker
as though viscosity were a moral argument.

And above all—
do not let your ego,
that pampered tyrant,
convince you that solitude is superiority
and pride is dignity.

Ego prefers applause to peace.
It would rather be right than reconciled,
admired than understood.
It will advise you to walk away
at the precise moment you ought to sit still.

Consider the examples we are never taught to examine:
The man who abandons steadiness
for the intoxication of novelty,
only to discover that novelty has no memory.

The woman who confuses intensity with intimacy,
mistaking chaos for depth,
and calls boredom what is merely calm.

The family elder who vetoes happiness
because it does not resemble their own.

The friend who whispers doubt
because your growth threatens their stagnation.

These are not villains.
They are simply unexamined people—
and unexamined people are extraordinarily destructive.

Growth with another human being
is not a montage of shared holidays
or curated laughter.
It is the slow education of your worst instincts,
the patient redrafting of old reflexes,
the mutual agreement
not to weaponise each other’s wounds.

To grow with someone
means consenting to be seen mid-failure
and choosing to remain intelligible rather than impressive.
It means arguments that end in clarity,
not victory.
Silences that heal,
not punish.

This is rare.
Not poetic-rare.
Statistically rare.
Civilisationally endangered.

Most people want companionship
without the discipline it demands.
They want to be loved
without being known.
They want permanence
without responsibility.

So if you find the opposite—
someone who stays curious about you
after the mystery has worn thin,
who corrects you without contempt,
who does not flee when your shadow enters the room—
do not treat this as replaceable.

Do not test it for sport.
Do not sacrifice it to pride.
Do not confuse discomfort with incompatibility.

Because real connection is not loud.
It does not beg for witnesses.
It survives quietly,
like a well-built bridge
most noticed only after it collapses.

And when it is gone,
you will understand—too late—
that real was rare,
and rarity, once squandered,
does not return out of sympathy.

Hannah Arendt once observed, “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.”

There are certain calamities that arrive with trumpets and earthquakes, and others that steal upon us like a soft and solitary draught beneath the door. The fading of empathy belongs to the latter. It does not announce itself with spectacle. It is rather the gentle recession of warmth from a room whose furnishings remain immaculate and undisturbed, a subtle cooling of the moral atmosphere while everything visible appears fixed in its accustomed place. And yet, somewhere beneath the polished surface, something vital has slipped out of reach.

Picture, if you will, a modest town—neither exceptionally charming nor especially troubled. Morning light touches the cobblestones; the smell of bread rises from the baker’s window; children hurry to lessons with the earnest energy of youth. Nothing is amiss. And yet, deep in the hidden chambers of human intercourse, a quiet erosion begins.

A woman misplaces her glove upon the pavement. Not long ago, someone would have hastened to restore it to her—almost instinctively, as one retrieves a child’s balloon before the wind carries it off. Today, a passerby pauses, weighs the inconvenience, and continues on his way. A man seated on a bench hears the weary sigh of the stranger beside him, but he does not lift his eyes from his newspaper. A shopkeeper observes the trembling hand of an elderly customer as she counts her coins, yet offers no word of ease or patient smile. Each omission is small—so small that no one would think to record it. But small neglects are how a great forgetting begins.

The real danger lies in the outward sameness of things. Empathy may depart, but no roof tiles shift to mark its absence. Doors open and close as they always have. It is entirely possible to live for quite some time in a civilisation that is quietly hollowing itself from within. The polite conventions remain; it is the soul of them that grows thin.

When empathy retreats, efficiency often steps forward to take its place. People grow competent but unkind, courteous but detached. They selve themselves into private enclosures where compassion is treated as an optional virtue—pleasant, perhaps, but not strictly necessary. And in that chill interior climate, Arendt’s warning becomes clear: the loss of empathy is not simply a personal failing but a structural crack in the great arch of civilisation.

For once a populace ceases to imagine the inward life of its neighbour, it becomes perilously ready to accept hardness as wisdom, indifference as order, cruelty as the unavoidable logic of the times. A society may descend into barbarism not by a dramatic plunge but by a slow descent—step by unremarkable step—until someone finally wonders, with a kind of startled sorrow, When did we cease to care for one another?

And yet the frost is not final. Hope remains wherever a single heart pauses before turning away, wherever one human soul recognises another as kin. Civilisation is upheld not by grand declarations but by the quiet, unwavering acts of charity that warm the world from within.

So I would ask you, friend and fellow traveller in this fragile age: what small gesture of human kindness passed through your week—either offered or received—and what faint yet steadfast promise did it carry of the world we might still become?

Tonight, as the lights of New York flicker against the winter sky, the city divides itself between jubilation and disbelief. Some will rejoice; others will mourn. For what has occurred is, by every measure, extraordinary: a thirty-three-year-old South Asian Muslim—a proud democratic socialist—has been elected Mayor of New York City.

Had any person, two short years ago, stood in a political forum and foretold this, they would have been dismissed with polite laughter, as one humoured for his naiveté. Yet the improbable, when driven by conviction and youth, has always been the secret rhythm of history. Was it not so when, in 2011, the cry Occupy Wall Street swept through the arteries of this same city, declaring war on greed and inequality? Or fifty years before that, when four students from a humble Black college in Greensboro, North Carolina, quietly seated themselves at a Woolworth’s lunch counter and ignited the Civil Rights Movement?

Such uprisings share a single divine trait: they begin in obscurity, born not in boardrooms or parliaments but in the restless souls of the young. Without the sanction of elders or institutions, they seize the moral imagination of their generation long before even the most sympathetic commentators discern their meaning.

And so it is again. We stand within a moment whose full significance will only be grasped in hindsight—a moment that will reshape how we understand New York, America, and indeed the world. This is no mere political campaign; it is a generational awakening. The under-forty multitude—organised, impassioned, and unyielding—has out-manoeuvred those who were either sceptical or scandalised by their audacity. Whether the matter be the plight of Palestine, the inhuman cost of New York’s housing, or the weary cynicism of the old order, they have spoken with one voice: the age of complacency is over.

As an author, I cannot claim surprise that such a movement should arise amidst the turbulence of a second Trump presidency. I sensed, even then, that something new would be born of disillusionment. Yet I did not know its name until I began to see familiar faces—my own friends—labouring within the Mamdani campaign, their energy, intellect, and digital fluency shaping one of the most compelling media strategies of our time.

If the movement called No Kings was the cry of anti-Trump Baby Boomers seeking to reclaim a lost ideal, then Mamdani for Mayor has become the anthem of Generation Z—the same generation that filled the streets after the murder of George Floyd, and who, upon witnessing the devastation in Gaza, rose again in solidarity, even when their own universities turned upon them.

That they have now turned to electoral politics as their chosen form of resistance is both strategic and tragic. It is the fruit of repression. Over the past year, thousands of student activists—and even their mentors—have been suspended, expelled, deprived of livelihood, and in some cases, detained and threatened with deportation. The very campuses once heralded as citadels of free speech have become perilous terrain for those who dare to speak of justice in Palestine.

But movements animated by moral conviction do not vanish; they migrate. Driven off the quadrangles and lecture halls, these young idealists have found a new banner to march behind—the candidacy of a magnetic young Assembly Member who, through eloquence and authenticity, transformed protest into political power. First, they secured an astonishing primary victory, achieving record youth turnout. And tonight, they have carried that fervour into the general election, delivering a triumph as decisive as it is symbolic.

Let us call it what it is: a generational victory—perhaps even a generational vindication. The weary prophets of decline who claimed that the young cared for nothing but screens and slogans must now eat their words.

This moment, luminous and unsettling, joins a lineage of American awakenings. It is not the first of its kind, nor shall it be the last. For the great wheel of history turns not by the strength of the old, but by the vision of the young—those who, even when the night seems longest, still believe the dawn can be summoned.

PS: It is impossible for me to regard this as mere news, for it touches me on a far more intimate plane. His mother is not merely an acquaintance, but a senior to several of my dearest friends, with whom she remains in close companionship. To many whom I hold in the highest affection, she has been both guide and mentor — a figure of wisdom and poise whose influence has quietly shaped their paths. She has worked alongside writers and publishers who are among my closest confidants, her presence woven through the very fabric of my own circle. And so, yes — this moment, this triumph, is not a distant spectacle for me, but something deeply, almost tenderly, personal.

Meet him.
Not Black, not Muslim, not Latino.
Not trans, not immigrant, not gay.
Not a card-carrying revolutionary,
not the frothing caricature you wanted.
Just a typical, homegrown lad,
straight as a plumb line,
a son, a brother, a suitor, a mate, refined by a conservative hearth—
and such hands are pulling the trigger.

So what now?
Do you stitch another fence from your fears?
Raise another shibboleth?
Wave another flag, red or blue,
as though stitched cloth could cauterise the wound?
You think radicalisation redeems?
You think polarisation purifies?
Antiquity laughs in the physiognomy of your illusions.
From Belfast to Bosnia,
from Rwanda to Westminster’s own whispering antechambers,
blood has always flowed
when men mistook categories for causes.

It is easy to mourn the dead,
to canonise them in marble prose,
to cry martyr, saint, beloved.
But brave you admit
that their words, their deeds, their ideology
cut others to ribbons while they yet breathed?
Valiant you hold paradox in your palm—
to love the slain and still
recognise the lesions they left behind?
Or must you always polish the past
until it gleams in a single colour?

Why does compassion crumble
the moment it meets conflict?
Why do we, clever apes,
demand a world painted in absolutes—
black or white, villain or angel—
when the truth is muddier,
a swamp of motives,
a cesspit of contradictions?

Unconditional love—
is it sermon or substance?
Does it mean to embrace
the murderer and the mourners alike,
to carry both insult and affection,
venom and antidote,
as though they were salt crystals upon the tongue?
And yet—
a pinch of salt, we say,
British understatement camouflaging despair:
It’s all good, baby, baby.
But is it?
Tell that to Gaza’s children.
Tell that to the mother of Stephen Lawrence.
Tell that to the father who buried his boy
after Columbine, after Sandy Hook,
after Uvalde, after London Bridge.
Is it all good?
Or is that phrase a nostrum,
smoothing over jagged veracity?

I ask you—
what if the problem is not extremism
but our refusal to sit in dissonance,
to experience its bitterness,
to accept that love must live with critique,
that empathy must coexist with resentment?
What if accord will never be built
from symmetry or certainty,
but from the messy work of holding opposites
without breaking?

So take your slogans, your scapegoats,
your shrill chants of “them” and “us,”
and taste them—
with a pinch of salt.
Swallow, if you dare.
It will burn on the lingua and glossa.
It will make you question
whether you have ever truly thought,
or only borrowed thought from louder voices.
It will make you squirm,
because exactitude is no banquet—
it is gristle, sinew, bone.
And it is yours to chew.

Once, the patterns were legible.
The habitual offender.
The ideologue nursing his factional frenzy.
The broken soul, warped by trauma or twisted chemistry.
We could explain them away—
file them neatly under pathology or politics.

But now?
Now the face is familiar.
The figure is camouflaged as a friend,
a neighbour who mows the lawn,
the colleague who shares your tea break,
the classmate who once copied your notes.

And when such a countenance turns,
when such a hand clenches around the firearm,
what excuse remains?
What comfort in the old categories?
What shield against the statistic
that the monstrous now wears
the pretence of the prototypical?

So I ask—
If the neighbour becomes the threat, who remains neighbour?
If the scholar becomes the killer, who remains wise?
If the ordinary becomes the executioner, what remains of the ordinary?
And if the veneer of normality can hide anything—
how long before it hides you?

Which brings us to the final, most unforgiving inquest.
People act as they do because people are pushed—
pushed against walls, pushed into corners,
pushed until the mind itself buckles under the strain.

Violence, we are told, erupts only when there is no other way out.
Yet irony mocks us:
it is often the free, the strong, the educated—
those with choices—that lift the weapon.
For you cannot expect the man, the woman, the child in Gaza,
starved of agency and shackled by rubble,
to redraw the law with their bare hands.

So why, then, are those who might have chosen amity
driven to the brink of madness?
Why do those with liberty squander it on bullets?
Should those who push not have learnt from history?
For history speaks, again and again:
whatever you sow—courtesy or cruelty,
mercy or malice— ricochets to you a hundredfold.
And if today resistance rises like smoke,
it is only because tirades of turbulence
were thundered from pulpits and podiums.

So the query stands, unresolved, unavoidable:
How do we bring kindness into a world
so fluent in fury?
How do we restrain the hand
before it clenches into a fist?
How do we calm the earth, unsettled and quaking,
when our very values tremble like sand?
What is ethics, what is morality,
if not the courage to refuse the cycle of return?
And if we cannot answer—
what hope remains of peace at all?

Is this truly a day of independence?

There are few spectacles more tragic—or more divine—than the slow, incandescent erosion of a gifted soul. Mr. Burton, the 2025 cinematic meditation on the life of Richard Burton, is not merely a film, nor even a biographical retelling—it is a grand threnody to the soul of man burdened with greatness. And in the hands of Harry Lawtey, that burden becomes a thing of unspeakable majesty.

The modern biopic, more often than not, leans toward an unwholesome gluttony. It gorges itself on costume, scandal, and period furniture, believing that verisimilitude lies in mimicry and plot. But Mr. Burton does something entirely different—something braver and more sacred. It looks not at what Richard Burton did, but who he became beneath the armour of theatrical success and tabloid fame. It trades narrative for revelation, choosing to illuminate not the chronology of a life, but the contours of a soul at war with itself.

At the heart of this ecclesiastical venture stands Harry Lawtey, whose performance is not a portrayal, but a transfiguration. There is no artifice, no strain, no desperate thespian showboating. Rather, Lawtey descends—yes, descends—into the infernal crevices of Burton’s torment, bringing back with him the fire of a man who could command Lear with the voice of a god, yet crumbled like dust before his own reflection. Lawtey’s eyes alone, in moments of silence, achieve more than most entire scripts manage with armies of words. He has not studied Burton to impersonate him; he has become Burton to understand him. This, I daresay, is not acting. This is theology.

But let us speak honestly about what Mr. Burton dares to depict: the unbearable paradox of genius. Burton, as presented here, is no hero. He is no villain either. He is a man—flesh and folly, thunder and ruin. He drinks not only from bottles but from the poisoned chalice of his own fame. He hungers, not for applause, but for absolution. The film does not sanctify him, nor does it crucify him; it reveals him. It allows him to remain unsolved, unredeemed, and therefore unforgettably human.

The film’s direction, far from overreaching, shows the wisdom of restraint. The camera lingers not to flatter but to confess. Scenes unfold not with orchestral grandeur, but with the hush of liturgy. We are given time—not to consume Burton, but to contemplate him. The cinematography understands darkness—not merely as an absence of light, but as the necessary cradle in which certain truths must be born. The script, elegant and sparse, often withholds more than it delivers, inviting the viewer into that rarest of cinematic experiences: listening.

It would be an injustice, however, to speak only of Burton the man, or Lawtey the vessel. One must also consider Mr. Burton as an argument against our age’s obsession with clarity. In a world that demands every story be neat, every personality either saint or scoundrel, this film dares to suggest that the most vital lives are those that remain unresolved. It reminds us that the human being is not a thesis to be proven, but a psalm to be wrestled with.

What Lawtey achieves here will be studied—must be studied—for decades to come. Not for its technique (though it is rich with it), nor for its resemblance (though it is uncanny), but for its courage. He has looked into the abyss of a man both beloved and broken, and rather than flinch or romanticise, he has remained. And in doing so, he has given us not simply Richard Burton, but a mirror into ourselves.

In the final analysis, Mr. Burton is not about fame or theatre or self-destruction. It is about the divine terror of being known—by others, by history, by Providence, and most of all, by oneself. It is a film one does not watch, but survives. And when the last scene fades, what remains is not applause, nor even sorrow, but silence—the kind of silence one finds in old churches and ruined cathedrals. The silence of something holy having passed through.

A bloody fucking miraculous feat, indeed, if I may be forgiven the phrase.