Paradox

The Waste Lands, subtitled REDEMPTION, begins with a paradox: to Roland, Jake seems both alive and dead.

So I answer your paradox with another.” “Then your conclusion?” “That I am not a traitor.” “To which I must agree, since your argument is irrefutable.” “Then may I ask you why you had us secretly followed?” “Because to all the facts there is a third explanation.

I was grateful to Newt for calling it to my attention, for the quotation captured in a couplet the cruel paradox of Bokononist thought, the heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality, and the heartbreaking impossibility of lying about it.

But the paradox in that was inexorable.

She thought of calling for coffee and with the thought came that ever- present awareness of paradox in the Fremen way of life: how well they lived in these sietch caverns compared to the graben pyons; yet, how much more they endured in the open hajr of the desert than anything the Harkonnen bondsmen endured.

Viewed from a higher standpoint, whole generations and epochs, when they show themselves infected with any moral fanaticism, seem like those intercalated periods of restraint and fasting, during which an impulse learns to humble and submit itself—at the same time also to purify and sharpen itself; certain philosophical sects likewise admit of a similar interpretation (for instance, the Stoa, in the midst of Hellenic culture, with the atmosphere rank and overcharged with Aphrodisiacal odours).—Here also is a hint for the explanation of the paradox, why it was precisely in the most Christian period of European history, and in general only under the pressure of Christian sentiments, that the sexual impulse sublimated into love (amour-passion).

The bad side of human thought will always be defined by the paradox of Jean Jacques Rousseau—you remember—the mandarin who is killed five hundred leagues off by raising the tip of the finger.

Therefore they are not really a higher kind of life, but a lower.” This reasoning, however, seemed to end in a paradox, and lead to the further consideration:—“What matter though it be only disease, an abnormal tension of the brain, if when I recall and analyze the moment, it seems to have been one of harmony and beauty in the highest degree—an instant of deepest sensation, overflowing with unbounded joy and rapture, ecstatic devotion, and completest life?” Vague though this sounds, it was perfectly comprehensible to Muishkin, though he knew that it was but a feeble expression of his sensations.

There are still human beings here below who know how to open and close the surprise box of the paradox merrily.

Beginners How they are provided for upon the earth, (appearing at intervals,) How dear and dreadful they are to the earth, How they inure to themselves as much as to any—what a paradox appears their age, How people respond to them, yet know them not, How there is something relentless in their fate all times, How all times mischoose the objects of their adulation and reward, And how the same inexorable price must still be paid for the same great purchase.

Of course it’s all paradox, don’t you know, Hughes and hews and hues the colour, but it’s so typical the way he works it out.

Nasir was shocked at his ungenerous outlook, and Auda was glad to rub into a townsman the paradox of tribe and city; the collective responsibility and group-brotherhood of the desert, contrasted with the isolation and competitive living of the crowded districts.

“There is talk on Parella and the planets of Dan about another jihad against such things as this.” Moneo lifted the lasgun and smiled, signaling that he knew the paradox in such empty dreams.

With respect to these organs, Mr. Mivart, as on so many previous occasions, asks: “What would be the utility of the first rudimentary beginnings of such structures, and how could such insipient buddings have ever preserved the life of a single Echinus?” He adds, “not even the sudden development of the snapping action would have been beneficial without the freely movable stalk, nor could the latter have been efficient without the snapping jaws, yet no minute, nearly indefinite variations could simultaneously evolve these complex coordinations of structure; to deny this seems to do no less than to affirm a startling paradox.” Paradoxical as this may appear to Mr. Mivart, tridactyle forcepses, immovably fixed at the base, but capable of a snapping action, certainly exist on some starfishes; and this is intelligible if they serve, at least in part, as a means of defence.

As it has been well expressed in the paradox of Poe, wisdom should reckon on the unforeseen.

Its followers are very numerous; and as men are fond of paradoxes, and of appearing to understand what surpasses the comprehension of ordinary people, the paradox which it maintains, concerning the unproductive nature of manufacturing labour, has not perhaps contributed a little to increase the number of its admirers.