There is a distinct possibility that I'm screwing up my life, day by day, but good, so I haven't felt the need to do a landmark, and you aren't going to get one here.
I will say that I finished my first book a few months ago, and I'm deep into the second.
I'm going after the Fall. That means Adam, Eve is decoration, the Fall is about Adam and God. (It's said, and I agree, that a love triangle between two guys and a girl is really between the two guys.)
It's superhero story, in the way of Unbreakable, except the superhero angle is going to be so muted that only people looking for a superhero story will see one. It's even less muted than the Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
I'm taking five people through college, from their disparate senior years in high school '96 through to their freshman year in college when they meet, through 9/11, and the story is going to concern the task of public education. It's a story about people, so the important bits are going to be done and not said, but I want it to do for the Fall what East of Eden did for Cain and Abel.
The two quotes guiding the book are going to be from Robert South:
quote:He came into the world a philosopher, which sufficiently appeared by his writing the Nature of things upon their names: he could view essences in themselves, and read forms without the comment of their respective properties: he could see consequences yet dorman in their principles, and effects yet unborn and in the womb of their causes: his understanding could almost pierce into the future contingents; his conjecture improving even to prophecy, or the certainties of prediction; till his fall his mind was ignorant of nothing but Sin; or at least it rested in the notion without the smart of the Experiment.
and Hobbes:
quote:Whereupon having both eaten, they did indeed take upon them God's office, which is judicature of good and evil, but acquired no new ability to distinguish between them aright.
Before the fall, Adam could see correctly into God's design of Good and Evil, but in the Fall, Adam took upon himself the task of assigning Good and Evil, not merely discerning God's design.
quote: it was then they first judged their nakedness (wherein it was God's will to create them) to be uncomely; and by being ashamed did tacitly censure God Himself.
The fruit is the first assigning, and Adam's keen sighted wisdom has been corrupted ever since. We are no longer that Adam that South describes. The book chronicles five people scrambling to get that unerring, keen-sighted wisdom back, post-fall, their different paths, their different results, the different lessons they take from each other, a healthy helping of the funny, and a few forced rhymes.
That said, I want make sure I tease as much out of the situation as approriate, so here are my questions:
Is curiosity a vice or virtue? Is pure science or math worthy or wicked? Is it insight into divinity or distracting one from prayer and thought?
[ October 27, 2005, 01:41 PM: Message edited by: Irami Osei-Frimpong ]
Posted by KarlEd (Member # 571) on :
To me, curiosity is neutral. It is the object of curiosity and the intent that turn it to vice or virtue.
Pure science and math are worthy. They are perhaps the only human pursuits that aren't ultimately circular.
Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
my answer to all of your questions is "it depends" unfortunately it all would come down to situational ethics which is hard to hypothesize about without the actual situation.
AJ
Posted by katharina (Member # 827) on :
quote:That means Adam, Eve is decoration, the Fall is about Adam and God. (It's said, and I agree, that a love triangle between two guys and a girl is really between the two guys.)
Woah, burn.
Why do you think so? Unsurprisingly, I disagree dramatically. A love triangle with two guys and a girl will make guys spectacularly uncomfortable because she has all the power. The best way to take the power back is to cut her out of the equation altogether and pretend she's a nonentity. So, in that sense, uh, congratulations. There's a long history of writers who have tried to do that.
Posted by KarlEd (Member # 571) on :
A lot of guys do think the girl is a non-entity (or at best, a "prize" to be won). Unfortunately a lot of girls stand for that. Their whole lives. Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
Karl Ed, are Chemistry and physics chemistry "pure" science, if you perform experiments it sort of becomes applied at that point even if it isn't engineering.
A nuclear reaction could easily be construed as pure science, but it could easily be a bomb...
Math, maybe, I don't see how theoretical math would ever get you in trouble, except for Ted Kaznyzki.
AJ
Posted by katharina (Member # 827) on :
quote:A lot of guys do think the girl is a non-entity (or at best, a "prize" to be won). Unfortunately a lot of girls stand for that. Their whole lives.
I had a lit professor say that the reason so many romance novels have traditionally focused on the begining stages of love is because that is the only stage in which the female has any power at all. Once it is an established relationship, there is still drama, but little choice and therefore no conflict.
Posted by KarlEd (Member # 571) on :
I don't think science can progress without a nuclear reaction somewhere along the line. It's all part of learning about the universe, which is, to me, one of the basic reasons for life at all (whether you believe in an externally given or internally discovered purpose to life). It is a perversion of mankind that turns it into a bomb.
I'm talking "science". I'm unclear on the difference, I guess, between "pure" and "applied". I'd think "pure" science would include experiments. You might argue that you are "applying" established science in the pursuit of "new" science, but the pursuit itself I would call "pure". I could be bastardizing the language for my own use, though.
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