Tuesday, September 22, 2009

My own personal literary and philosophical theory

This is my own personal literary and philosophical theory. Years of higher education and practiced BS convinced me that to be a true intellectual I absolutely must have one. So here it is, complete with hypothetical example and strong bias:

“Science is an art;* art is a science. Everything is everything.”

There it is, guaranteed to explain and interpret any conceivable literary or philosophical ideas, past, present, or future. I like to explain it using the great wall example:

You are in a room with a great, blank wall. Someone hands you a marker and says, “please write your name on the white board,” indicating the wall in front of which you stand.

“That’s not a white board; that’s a wall,” you tell him. But you are wrong. If the wall has characteristics like those of a whiteboard, is it not a whiteboard? It is hard and upright and smoothly white. You can write on it with a marker. And, some way or another, you can wipe it off. If you want to split hairs you can call it a wall. If you want to be specific, pointed, descriptive. If you want to be picky, intellectual, uncompromising, you can call it a wall. If a behemoth, muscular giant approaches you and says walls are life and whiteboards are death and you value life, you may call it a wall. But really, it is just as much a whiteboard as a wall, a science as an art. Everything is everything.

P.S. Some people may tell you this is not a theory, but an anti-theory. Don’t believe them.

*Please note the semicolon, without which my own personal literary and philosophical theory is incomplete.


-R.A.

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