Yes, Nearly Poem by gershon hepner

With “yes, nearlies, ” “almost sos, ” we can
come closer to the truth far closer than
with certainties of “definitely yeses, ”
ignoring that behind the truth lies guesses.
Because uncertainties don’t dazzle or
mislead, they do encourage one to be
impatient only with those who deplore
all people with whom they do not agree.

Inspired by an article on John Stuart Mill by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker, October 6,2008 (“The Passion of John Stuart Mill”) :

Like every intelligent Englishman of an epicurean cast, he spent as much time as he could in France. Though he was quietly Francophile from early on, his illness and recovery made him declaratively so. He bought a little house in the papal town of Avignon, in the South of France; it became the home of his heart, where, in his later years, he lived and wrote, and where, eventually, he died. He always condescended to the French, as even Francophile Englishmen will: “Whenever anything goes amiss, the habitual impulse of French people is to say, ‘Il faut de la patience’ ”—One must be patient—“and of English people, ‘What a shame.’ The people who think it a shame when anything goes wrong—who rush to the conclusion that the evil could and ought to have been prevented, are those who, in the long run, do most to make the world better.” The hopes that had been raised and then ruined by the 1848 revolution in France played the same role for Mill’s generation that the fall of the Iron Curtain and the rise of Putin have played in our time: inspiring proof that liberalism might win after all, followed by the crushing realization that it was no match for authoritarian, strongman nationalism, which, in France, took the form of the papier-mâché emperor Louis-Napoleon. (The French experience burned Mill badly. It led him, for a while, to propose, in the ideal republic, giving educated voters more votes than uneducated ones—it was a nation of peasants who had voted in Louis-Napoleon.)
Yet France, even after Mill’s disappointments with its politics, remained for him the great good place. The humanizing influence of French civilization—“the free and genial atmosphere of Continental life, ” as he called it—tempered his drier certainties. The mature Mill is a stable thinker but not a systematic one. He recognizes the existence of half-truths alongside near-truths, and of “almost so”s right by “yes, nearly”s. “Truth, in the great practical concerns of life, is so much a question of the reconciling and combining of opposites, ” he once wrote. “Even progress, which ought to superadd, for the most part only substitutes, one partial and incomplete truth for another.”…
Throughout the thirties and forties in early-Victorian England, no one was more attended to than the radical Mill. We can only envy his public, for he would have been a terrible pundit for our sound-bite age. He isn’t an aphorist; his stuff takes space. Mill’s sentences sway and ponder with the heavy grace of elephants, and are often about the same size. Defending a philosophy of hedonism, he writes sentences that contain more philosophy than hedonism: “The happiness which they meant was not a life of rapture; but moments of such, in an existence made up of few and transitory pains, many and various pleasures, with a decided predominance of the active over the passive, and having as the foundation of the whole, not to expect more from life than it is capable of bestowing.” “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, ” in other words, but no rosebuds fall on the page. Whatever the subject, Mill surveys the ground, clears it of underbrush, builds a house of straw to demonstrate what a shoddy house looks like, sets it on fire, and in its place builds a house of brick, which he dares you to knock down. The house of brick is, as Victorian brick houses usually were, lacking in grace and lightness and charm, but it still stands. You don’t come away from Mill dazzled, as you do with Ruskin or Carlyle, but you come away with a place to live your life.

10/4/08