A cold january night

Whatever misfit creature invented the term, brought such an ego fraught mandate into the world, this thing, this idea of contrasting what something is with what else it could possibly be -- nothing but unequivocal, rampant, agonizing narcissism can ensue, when it collides, as it inevitable does, with the similar contrast between the lens of depravity through which we see, coloring everything in its own likeness, and the pure austerity we presume should be, merely because it is in contrast with the thing we call depravity.

So the 'potential' of a given object lies in how closely we can compare it, once it has passed through the subjunctifying processes of seeing, to the things in ourselves which we have assigned with the values of 'good,' 'austere,' 'vivacious,' in contrast with how much more we think we could make it like that.

But here's the rub: Henry David Thoreau observed a philanthropist to be a man who ate a bad apple and got sick. His vision blurred, and he became feverish. He then set out to cure the rest of the world of these problems; of being blurry and too hot.