‘Today’s topic, fellow students, is ambition. As you may know, some of us here at this fine institution harbor some pretty lofty ambitions. It’s OK, we can’t help it. People have been blowing sunshine up our asses for years.”

Thus began my column for last week, which The Daily rejected for being “too literary.” It needed to be a little more “straightforward.” Though it is wonderful criticism — the most flattering, surely, I will ever receive — and brilliantly tactful, perhaps by “too literary,” the editors meant, “We didn’t know what the hell you were talking about.” Is it the obligation of a writer to be poisonously clear, to try to make a pathetic point in so few words?

My manifesto hinted at the emptiness of purely personal ambition, the self-delusional type that in spangled veils shrouds vanities and vices in virtue:

“Thespians: does not the glamour of community theater entice? Texans-cum-vegetarians: Are your fluid ideas and open minds uprooted as easily as the plants you eat? Are they just as immobile?”

Maybe the editors were right; 90 percent of the readers would have left the column behind, nonplussed, indifferent, or both. But for the 10 percent who did get it, they would have loved it more than the other 90 percent were ever capable of. To me, that’s reason enough to publish it.

I can’t write on ambition, I told the editors, if I am not allowed to do so in a less-than-straightforward tone. It would be absurd (not to say ambitious) to try to tackle any aspect of such a topic in less than 600 words. That’s why I chose the poetic-manifesto form.

I am sure all of you are very familiar with the arguments I would offer as for why they should have published my column. “That’s not what journalism is,” you might say. While I understand that a strand of words roped down the right side of an Op-Ed page do not normally command attentive reading, I hoped to push the envelope a little bit, rather than spoon-feed an underestimated populace more of the same pap.

While all the other columnists overtly trumpet what bothers them about the world — while they delude themselves into thinking that maybe, just maybe, their little column can make a little difference — I too deluded myself. That column was not frippery, a verbal gambol filled with idiosyncratic flourishes. Its content had a very palpable message. It was also a statement in its form — inconvenienced, unfortunately, by a degree of subtlety alien to mainstream press — against the tonal monotony of journalism.

Was I myself too ambitious to try to write a column worth reading twice, a column open to interpretation?

Perhaps, but I am no slave to my ambitions. This column itself — which very overtly trumpets my personal misgivings — is, in a way, a self-betrayal. That is another way of saying my ambition, so precious, failed.

In a final — and predictable — tragicomic gesture to end a clichՀ