the last arrow in my quiver of whimsy

multispan logic



faced with two apparently incompatible conceptions of the city, i oscillate between the two attitudes. sometimes i embrace both simultaneously. that's a trick i learned from science fiction, incidentally: "multispan logic," as it was called in zenger's famous novel the mind plateau. it took his hero twenty years of ascetic study in the cloisters of the brothers of aldebaran to master the trick. i've accomplished it in twenty years of reading nova and deep space and solar quarterly. yes: multispan logic. yes. the art of embracing contradictory theses.

"i know of nothing in all drama more incomparable from the point of view of art, nothing more suggestive in its subtlety of observation, than shakespeare’s drawing of rosencrantz and guildenstern.

...

they never die. horatio, who in order to ‘report hamlet and his cause aright to the unsatisfied,’

‘absents him from felicity a while,
and in this harsh world draws his breath in pain,’

dies, but guildenstern and rosencrantz are as immortal as angelo and tartuffe, and should rank with them. they are what modern life has contributed to the antique ideal of friendship."



who said it?

l