When I was young

I could not imagine a career
or being under someone's thumb
from nine to five.
I just wanted to be wise.

And so I read philosophy
(for a while) at university.

This was silly  –
mere escapism.

Wisdom is not knowledge –
not even knowledge of philosophy.
It consists, as Joseph Heller almost suggested
in the suspicion that there is no such thing,

*  *  *  *  *

Amongst the many things that destroy the pursuit (even the idea) of wisdom are "issues of identity".

In 'The Closing of the American Mind' (1987), for example, the American philosopher Allan Bloom argued that the point of an education should be to explore ‘what is accessible to all men as men [we will now include women and trans-people] through their common and distinctive faculty, reason.’ 

He found, however, that universities were more likely to teach a cultural relativism focused on how different cultures approached truth. 

According to Bloom, this splintering of truth into culture also manifested on an individual level, as people pursued studies based on their class, gender or race – not their common concern for what it meant to be wise. Moreover, no one was encouraging them to do otherwise: ‘[F]athers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise.’