Monday, November 2, 2009

Cat's Cradle

This book Cat’s Cradle I think has a lot of post modernistic themes within it. The first thing I noticed in this book that seemed to relate most with what we’ve been talking about in class is found in the beginingish of chapter 4. “All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.” At first, this statement seems like an obvious contradiction, but when I thought about it in terms of what we’ve been talking about in class, I came to realize that nothing can be considered an “absolute” truth. This is why he says that even though the things he says are true, the words he uses to say them are not. However, just because things, or words in particular, can never be absolute truths, does not mean that there can be no truths. I mean, how else would the human race communicate if not for the attachment of “words” to certain objects or even non-tangible things, such as emotion? “Words” are an obvious necessity, even if they are just symbols for the real object, and I find it funny that this seems like a big deal.
Anyway, I also remembered the part in the end of chapter 6 where Dr. Hoenikker questions the true nature of sin. For the sake of the assignment, I’ll quote it. “A scientist turned to Father and said, ‘Science has now known sin.’ And do you know what Father said? He said, ‘What is sin?’” Sin, being a non-tangible object, cannot be clearly represented. Since the word sin cannot be attached to an actual object, it is connected to other words, that are connected to more words. This is similar to what we talked about in class, about not being able to reach an end to definitions, or to find an absolute truth.
Anyway, I mostly just think that even though things or ideas can never exits naturally, they still do exits, because we made them. And that’s ok.

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