2010-08-01
Explanation
This comic plays on the classic "wise man on the mountain" trope, where a seeker climbs to a remote mountaintop temple to ask a sage for life advice. The seeker poses a profound question: is it better to create the perfect work or to live the perfect life? The sage asks to see the seeker's work, which turns out to be a poetry book titled "My Soul Is a Vesper and Other Poems."
Upon reading the poetry, the wise old man bursts into uncontrollable laughter, snorting and cackling at how bad it is. After composing himself and apologizing, he delivers his verdict: "Go for the perfect life." The humor lies in the sage's answer being entirely determined by the terrible quality of the seeker's creative output rather than any deep philosophical reasoning. Instead of offering timeless wisdom, the old man is essentially saying, "Your work is so bad that you should definitely not pursue that path." It is a deflation of both the pretentious seeker and the wise-man-on-the-mountain genre itself.