I've noticed that often the best ideas that people have never find any
solid or striking expression, but are spread out in many little
details.

I can give two examples of this from my own work, though I also notice
it a lot in friends. The first is my work on website design and
biography, especially the idea of collections beating sites. I tried
to write this up as an essay:

http://inamidst.com/stuff/2010/organise

But it seems to miss so much of what I was trying to say.

The second is that I've been doing some work on looking at how the
koine (common) Greek of the New Testament has been badly translated,
and have tried to gradually understand the problems inherent in
translation. Some of these differences are vast, and so slowly, piece
by piece, I've been chipping away at the grubby patina which surrounds
these old texts.

But there's no one single place where I've collected these points.
Often I work on it and don't even write anything down properly, or it
just gets put in a .txt file somewhere on my hard drive.

In this latter case, there is also some measure of what I call
maieutic periplusing going on, which means that you have to work
through it in a particular order for it to make proper sense. The
general idea I'm trying to get across here, though, is that sometimes
a very weak collection of ideas widely spread out can beat a small but
sharp and clear thought.

Indeed I wonder whether the thin spreading out of an idea is what
helps it to subsist. Perhaps some complex thoughts simply can't exist
as a very bold and striking idea, no matter how much we'd like to
encode them like that.

* * *

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

(John Donne)

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