Scholars, Poets, and Smoke

What could be wrong with wanting to see the world purely, from a clean distance, loving none of it? Zarathustra calls that dream immaculate perception, and Clancy Martin, a philosophy professor who writes novels on the side, follows it to the darkest place in this episode: what detached, impersonal investigation has actually done in living memory when it kept its promise. Then his own trades come under fire, the scholars and the poets, and Martin remembers a warning his older brother gave him the day he chose philosophy over medicine. It ends with a fire dog, a volcano, and a case about which events actually change the world.