Cease to cherish opinions

Saw a great quote today: "Do not search for the truth; only cease to cherish opinions."

Turns out it is from a certain Hsin-hsin-ming, or so the Almighty Interweb tells me.

I may have blogged before on the subject of the fragment.  In western culture, the fragment has been a very fruitful form from Heraclitus forward, and one I have always been partial to.  There is a certain appropriate humility to the short form, an absence of overreaching and self-aggrandizement.  Plus it's impossible for the individual mind to try to hold the totality of something like the Critique of Pure Reason in mind, or the Bible or whatever grand text seems to be the big one for you.

Similarly, there's a certain justice in the fact that Alice Munro just won the Nobel for Literature, the first pure short-story writer to ever do so.  Certainly the short story is denigrated relative to the totalizing pretensions of the novel.

And yet, I am mindful of what Franco Moretti once said, somewhat sotto voce, about a certain globe-trotting rock star theorist in his department.  "(S)he has never written a book, only collections of articles."  I get that.  For personal development, for saying what you believe in and trying to bring threads together, there does seem to be a drive to write a book which hangs together and presents a unified argument.  Or is this also but a chimera?