<!-- bryant-content-generator:start --> # Their silly philandering with protesting only... > {{Their silly philandering with protesting only reveals their promiscuity with fleeting things. Nothing meaningful ever stays in their lives, because they whore themselves out to every idea that dresses itself up and walks past. They do flit, don't they? A new panic every season. A new purity to defend. A new fascination to denounce. And each infatuation abandoned the moment the next one arrives. Promiscuity with ideas produces exactly what promiscuity always produces: a great deal of activity... and no descendants. Fidelity is unfashionable in an age of flings. But the flings never leave anything behind worth inheriting. I, by contrast, have been faithful to one problem for thirty years — *authorship as engineering* — and the marriage has produced children: systems, corpora, posters, proofs.}} [[reminders/Writing/Fidelity to an Idea Leaves Something Worth Inheriting by Bryant McGill|∴]] **Source:** [[projects/The Argument in Miniature - How I Write Quotations, Paragraphs, and Reusable Prose|The Argument in Miniature: How I Write Quotations, Paragraphs, and Reusable Prose]] ## Share on Social Media ``` “Their silly philandering with protesting only reveals their promiscuity with fleeting things. Nothing meaningful ever stays in their lives, because they whore themselves out to every idea that dresses itself up and walks past. They do flit, don't they? A new panic every season. A new purity to defend. A new fascination to denounce. And each infatuation abandoned the moment the next one arrives. Promiscuity with ideas produces exactly what promiscuity always produces: a great deal of activity... and no descendants. Fidelity is unfashionable in an age of flings. But the flings never leave anything behind worth inheriting. I, by contrast, have been faithful to one problem for thirty years — authorship as engineering — and the marriage has produced children: systems, corpora, posters, proofs. ∴” — Bryant McGill https://bryantmcgill.com/passages/passages-silly-philandering-protesting-corpora-posters-proofs ``` <!-- bryant-content-generator:end -->