[lit-ideas] Re: The torture graph

  • From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sat, 08 Apr 2006 17:22:01 -0400

Ursula quotes Carl: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us.

Like jihad, this saying works both ways. If you get bamboozled long enough, you also tend to reject any evidence that you're NOT being bamboozled. It's more ego-syntonic to assume that there's only bamboozling going on.


Eric
___
Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him. That the poor little fellow because he lied too often was finally eaten up by a real beast is quite incidental. But here is what is important. Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.


-Vladimir Nabokov, "Good Readers and Good Writers"

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