paul (03/15/83)
Those of you interested in the idea of contradictions, consider the following quotes. If they make sense to you, you will hopefully see the idea of contradictions on a higher plane. I am interested in this not because of theology, but because of the impact of Puritan rhetoric on American literature and various American "tropes" or modes of discourse. "Twelve o'clock reported, sir" says the middy. "*Make* it so", replies the captain. And the bell is struck eight by the messenger-boy, and twelve o'clock it is.... Hand in hand we top-mates stand, rocked in our Pisgah top, the whole long cruise predestinated ours. Melville, White-Jacket Now in an artificial world like ours, the soul of man is further removed from its God and the Heavenly Truth, than the chronometer carried to China, is from Greenwich. And, as that chronometer, if at all accurate, will pronounce it to be 12 o'clock high-noon, when the Chinese local watches say, perhaps, it is 12 o'clock midnight; so the chronometric soul, if in this world true to its great Greenwich in the other, will always, in its so-called intuitions of right and wrong, be contradicting the mere local standards and watchmaker's brains of this earth....And it follows not from this, that God's truth is one thing and man's truth another; but -- as hinted above, and as will further elucidated in subsequent lectures -- by their very contradictions they are made to correspond. Melville, Pierre; or, the Amgiguities I have not sent these Prophetes, saith the Lord, yet thei ranne: I have not spoke to them, and yet thei prophecied. Jeremiah 23:21