Certainty is absence of infinity, infinity is presence of uncertainty.

Authoritative people bore me: but what bores me even more are those swarms of little people who love authority and in virtue of whom the authority of the authoritative can be exercised.

Much of what is asserted as true is so asserted, not as a declaration of what the speaker knows but rather as a defence against doubt in the hope that the opposite proposition may be thereby excluded.

] The real trouble is not the mere difference of opinion, as between one scholar and another, but the fact that Graves (like myself) refuses to treat his subject as dead. A scholar only feels secure if he is sure that the subject of his study is not one day going to get up and look him between the eyes; and nothing could be in worse taste than a suggestion that anything more is required of him than a chaste rational disinterestedness. Both the Buddha and the White Goddess, it is felt, have been safely dead these two thousand years and more, and the professors of these subjects congratulate themselves on having chosen such admirably extinct fields of study. (Quite the last thing that a professor of Buddhism would dream of doing is to profess Buddhism—that is left to mere amateurs like myself.) But what happens? Here comes Graves and myself shouting out one, that you cannot know the Goddess unless you worship her—and in the flesh, to boot (or, should I say, to buskin?)—, and, the other, that you cannot understand the Buddha unless you practise his teaching—in the jungle, preferably, and barefoot. If I have my way, these comfortable scholars will have to exchange the fleshpots of Oxford for the almsbowl of India; and if Graves has his, their dutiful wives will become Bassarids, dancing naked with Dionysian fury on Boar's Hill, and tearing the Vice-Chancellor to pieces and devouring him raw at the summer solstice. And that would never do, would it?

Two thoughts cannot coexist at the same time: if the clear light of mindfulness is present, there is no room for mental twilight.

This is a solid project that adds certainty to our production profile beyond 2007. The North Sea is important to our overall growth strategy, and Ettrick is a stepping stone to growing a sustainable business in this area.