Friday, August 26, 2016

Bookends

Someday, Nature willing, you will have a clearly-identifiable marker of something you have been or done for nineteen years.  It will, at first, be the simple fact of existence, but soon, there will be other identifiers, like residing somewhere, preferring a particular sports team, or pedaling a two-wheeler.

If you end up bearing responsibility for a member of the subsequent generation, one such marker will be the point at which they attain their legal majority and choose to cease living under your roof.  You will meet this eventuality eventually and you can reasonably expect it to color your perception of your perceptions.

The Angry Hippy noted, at the first of the evening’s two swims, that our own lives are currently palindromic on that score, as he welcomes into his house a new member the same month I have bid adieu to one who has shared my home for all this time together.

Bookends, if you will, just as last night’s ride was the mirror image of one almost exactly a year ago; same route (thanks to some skilled wayfaring), same destination, and same perfectly bruised skyline to the west along the way.

As Dr. Tittlefitz reminded me at the Lake, the 20th century philosopher, Willard Van Orman Quine, in his highly-influential essay, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” argues that the alleged bright line between what we know via experience and what we know via the process of analytic reasoning is not really so bright.

How we define the world defines how we experience it—and yet oddly, the expectation of cycle-swimming is not tantamount to its realization. 

As soon as RZA conceptualized the route, we could predict a set of outcomes—e.g, trail-riding, back-floating, beer-quaffing—but claims about those outcomes would not be true simply by definition; rather, they would have to be experienced for us to know them. 

Bookends may define possibilities; the experience in the middle, (e.g, trail-riding, back-floating, beer-quaffing), however, yields truth.

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