Clarity is the power that remains when the collective forms of higher knowledge have been dissolved. Doctrine, rite, and a living chain of transmission once did part of the seeing for a man. Those supports are thin now. What he can still do is refuse the fog. He continues to discriminate according to the permanent measure: higher from lower, form from formlessness, the center from the current that pulls away from it.
The late field is dense. News, chatter, appetite, and the mood of the hour press in until every difference looks like a preference. Density is used as an excuse. The man tells himself that the age is too confused for standards to apply. The excuse is the first lowering. The field is confused because the age has flattened rank. The flattening does not cancel the differences. It only makes them harder to keep in view.
Young men lose clarity in two ordinary ways. They take in more signal than they can judge, and they let the language around them erase the words that mark a real cut. Once quality, rank, and measure have been talked down into taste, the eye follows. Recovering the eye means cutting intake and keeping the old distinctions in speech. A man who will not say that one thing stands above another has already accepted the fog as his climate.
Keep the distinctions sharp in the next thing you look at. A task, a sentence, a friendship, a use of the body. Each can be seen under the permanent measure or swallowed by the weather of the day. The density of the age is not a reason to lower the standard of seeing. It is the reason the seeing has to be done by the man himself.