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So I think I'm the one who has to take responsibility for the introduction of the insipidly mission-statementy phrase "boldness and vision" into our class bank of generally desirable things (worse still, I think the phrase came flying off my finger tips because it was in the air during the College's "Bold Vision for Women" 125th anniversary).  But I'm happy to report that I think I'm beginning to see the fuzzy outlines of its possibility. 

"Local truths."  Something clicked there for me tonight.  Freeing ourselves of assumptions about there being a Truth really does mean escaping a kind of tyranny, escaping from a scenario in which we're always bound to fail, because we're aiming at acheiving the impossible.  Well, not that we don't stop failing to achieve Truth, but we can "Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better" (Beckett).  Failing better, I'd say, we can equate with local truth.  And you can call it better failure if you're in that kind of mood, or you can call it finite success... or something.  This means understanding ourselves as limited individuals with limited knowledge.  We're not "failures" because we're limited.  The limitation is the one thing that can't be otherwise.  And it's actually where the opportunity for "vision" comes from.  You can't see beyond the vanishing point of the horizon.  Okay.   You can see as far as you can see.  And you can conceive of a plan for traversing that space, a plan that you can actually feel relatively confident about.  Not so if you're trying to project yourself around the globe in one go.  And this needn't feel like resigning oneself to some lesser satisfaction... because the horizon moves forward when we move forward.  We can't have access to the vista afforded some imagined, omniscient outsider.  But every possible ground level angle of appraisal, every real person sized chunk of surveyable landscape is still potentially available to us.  Just not all at once.  Still looking for boldness... but maybe boldness ought to be replaced by simple curiosity, the curiosity that encourages you to creep forward, allowing your horizon to, bit by bit, expand, and expand, and expand.