The world can be seen as heavy and light. The heavy can be seen as filled; the light, as empty. The absence of matter would make for a tremendous vacuity and a hardly appetizing nothingness. The mind wants something to touch, to get hold of, to take up room, to weigh. And it is likewise, as I have stated before, in love with freedom, unobstruction, unhindering spatiality.

Meaning has a relation to weight. We say “empty of meaning”—and here meaning is regarded as filling something. We say likewise “empty of content”—and content is related to meaning.

If we are happy, we are ready to take the world; and this is equal to taking what it means. To be serious is to be ready to take, to be affected by, the meaning of anything. When we say a thing matters, we are saying it has the weight of matter, and that it means something.

To be serious, then, is a way of being accurate; for to give more meaning to a thing than is necessary or factual, would be to bring something, superfluously, to that thing from ourselves. To bring less meaning to a thing than it deserves, would be to deny something to that thing. This would mean to lessen it; and lessening of a thing is lessening of reality; and lessening of reality is a fundamental ill-doing.

And, therefore, to be serious is to take things as they are. The phrase “to take things as they are” has two connotations in everyday speech. One of these connotations—the most frequent—is to be lighthearted, to be casual, not to give more grave import to a situation than the moment requires. (The phrase “to take things as they are” is neighbor to the phrase “to take things as they come.”)

However, if one said: “I take things as they are”—with a slow accenting of the are, perhaps—there would be a gravity: even, it is likely, a solemnity in the person’s words. Seriousness would give these words both casualness and fulness; the “unsuperfluous everything.”

So seriousness is precision. It is precise as to the lightsome and the wonderful; if need be, the tragic. Where the serious is true and the humorous is true, they have more in common than what is between the humorous as true and the “humorous” as untrue.