On 1/11/06 15:12, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
Dear List participants,
Recent postings on Pale Fire seem to favor arguments towards reaching a "true solution" to VN's enigmas and not on how to enrich with amazing and amusing new finds the already very rich bibliography on the subject.
Satisfied desires are dead desires, the same can be said about "true solutions" ( fortunately these are impossible to reach in connection to VN's works).
This brings me to the rather perplexing news I got from my internet opening page ("Terra News") under the heading " The American Government suggests virginity until the age of 30" ( in my imprecise translation).
I immediately thought about Pale Fire ( quite safe ), "Ada" and envisioned a book with a title like "Reading Lolita in Washington,DC" ...
Jansy: a sea shanty in my repertoire says: “The best of intentions, they never go far/ After forty-two days on the floor of a bar.”
No doubt the US Gvt Health Dept means well -- luckily it’s ADVICE and would require MAJOR constitutional reform to ever become the LAW ;=) Enforceability would be a problem, and PROOF a nightmare of PRIVACY [sic] invasion (e.g., there is much Rabbinical objection to the notion that a VIRGIN birth * could ever serve as any kind of SIGN, least of all a Messianic SIGN — surely yet another pagan Helenistic instrusion into Christianity? **) — in some extant cultures, stoning & public decapitation have proved to be insufficient deterrents to wayward shagging. In my horrid Scouse juris-imprudence, a virgin is defined as any ugly girl under the age of ten.
* Isiah’s Hebrew has “... a young lady/maiden shall conceive ... “ which became “ ... a virgin shall conceive ....” in the Greek Septuagint — this earns a dangerously LOW TQ (Translation Quotient)!
** I’m with with John Shade (and plausibly with VN) “My God died young. Theolatry I found/ Degrading, and its premises, unsound./ NO FREE MAN NEDS A GOD; BUT WAS I FREE? [PF ll 99-101] Kinbote “ ... is bound to question the wisdom of this easy aphorism. Does this fact vitiate the JS/CK unitfication hypothesis? A sane ‘atheist ‘ (or maybe ‘agnostic’?) poet vs a deranged Deist (Defender of the Faith!) commentator?
YET, wearing my Cambridge logician’s hat (not RED but a woolly BLUE), I spot a POTENTIAL flaw in Shade’s reasoning, triggered by the phrase ‘UNSOUND premise’ with its syllogistic implications.
Assume TRUE: NO FREE MAN NEEDS A GOD — therefore the set MG (all men needing a God) and the set FM (all free men) are DISJOINT.
WAS JS A FREE MAN? If YES, JS belongs to FM and cannot belong to MG., i.e., JS does NOT need a God. End of Theolatry.
If JS NOT-FREE, as the rhetoric suggests (why else would he pose the question?), JS belongs to the complement of FM, AND we CANNOT deduce whether JS belongs to MG or NOT. You can draw a Venn (VN might prefer a Vann) diagram. JS thinks he has proved from NO FREE MAN NEEDS A GOD that ALL NOT-FREE MEN DO NOT NEED A GOD. In fact the complement of FM can contain members of MG, and the complement of MG can contain members of FM. Perhaps that’s why VN provides the CLUE: Unsound premises. One might add an ancient logician’s quip: JS and CK can never agree — because, being neighbours, they are arguing from DIFFERENT PREMISES!
Stan Kelly-Bootle