Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Pop quiz: The fundamentals of our science

No googling now! Who wrote these words?
Discussion of the fundamentals of our science seems to consist one half of obvious truisms, and one half of metaphysics; this is characteristic of matters whch form no real part of a subject … .

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

QUOTE
In August 1934, Tristan Tzara, James Joyce, and an inebriated american whom Joyce mistook for a wayward son of the Bloomsbury group (perhaps a consequence of his tendency to favour pseudo-cockney when in his cups) were sitting in the Cafe l'Opera in what then passed for downtown Zurich. Tzara was creating dadaist poetry by pulling from his pocket random slips of paper on which were written words taken, from a little-known German translation of a Greek translation of Saussure's correspondence with Friedrich Engels. "FIELD, damn you!" shouted the American. "It's bloomin' BLUMENFELD. Ex his una nocte decem inivi!" Whereupon he sneezed, blowing Tzara's words onto the pavement. When collected, they read 'truisms obvious of half, consist...'
UNQUOTE

Mr. Verb said...

Simply brilliant. The prize goes to you, Windowless Monad.