Banned Books, Paradoxes, UFOs

 From Atticus Review - STAFF RECOMMENDATIONS: Banned Books Week

  The Orthodoxy of Paradox, a review from The Millions by Gideon Leek.

“As we humans delve ever deeper in our quest to reveal the ultimate nature of reality, there is a stain in the picture that emerges,” writes critic and philosopher William Egginton in his new book, The Rigor of Angels. “That stain is what we might call the paradox of the moment of change: the instantaneous sliver of time when something, some particle, must be both perfectly identical to itself in space and time, so as to be the thing that changes, and somehow different, so as to have changed at all.” Tracing this paradox back to Achilles and the Tortoise, The Rigor of Angels finds solutions and unresolved questions in the disparate work of Borges, Heisenberg, and Kant. All three investigated points of discontinuity—those places of paradox where our greatest tools to understand reality fail us. Beyond the marquee, Egginton summons a wide supporting cast—Boethius, Ibn Rushd, Einstein, García Márquez, Sam Harris—for our triad to learn from and contradict. The result is a breezy and readable book; both a nice introduction to the orthodoxy of paradox for the casual reader and an informative (and funny) primer on various seemingly austere historical figures.

I have been noticing for the past or two how autumn is coming on. There are moments when everything seems to be reaching their fruition and also a stopping point. Behind the wind, I can feel winter coming and the desolation of snow and bare trees. There is, for me, that point of being in the doorway that I find interesting. Therefore, the presence of this note.

A bit of fun, a podcast: The Vatican, Mussolini, and a UFO cover-up – the Pentagon whistleblower story.