In an effort to re-ignite the part of my mind responsible for complex thought, and to prevent my already-dwindling English vocabulary from diminishing any further, I spent last night in bed with a famous French philosopher...well, his book anyway. I randomly selected an essay in the middle of the book and, I kid you not, this was the opening sentence:

"That philosophy died yesterday, since Marx or Hegel, Nietzsche, or Heidegger - and philosophy should still wander toward the meaning of its death - or that it has always lived knowing itself to be dying (as silently confessed in the shadow of the very discourse which declared philosophia perennis); that philosophy died one day, within history, or that it has always fed on its own agony, on the violent way it opens history by opposing itself to nonphilosophy, which is its past and its concern, its death and wellspring; that beyond the death, or dying nature, of philosophy, perhaps even because of it, thought still has a future, or even, as is said today, is still entirely to come because of what philosophy has held in store; or, more strangely still, that the future itself has a future - all these are unanswerable questions."

I was immediately struck by the realization that you'd either have to be Frenchman, or a philosopher, but preferably both, to have the chutzpah to pull off a sentence like that. I, on the other hand, would just come off like a pompous twit. Now why is that?