Grant -
Thanks for the reminder, I haven't visited Castenada since I was in my
twenties... perhaps he deserves a revisit. At the time I slogged
through several of his works because everyone was raving so much about
them (not unlike the ravings about Cormac's work)... they just came off
as weird druggie wishful thinking at the time... though I did like
things about his writing style.
Another great Fantasy (although held by most as mathematical logic) is
Kurt Godel's 1931 paper "On Formally Undecidable Propositions of
/Principia Mathematica/ and Related Systems".
Godel I visit more often. I don't consider him fantasy one bit, but I
do find him mystical/magical... and wonderfully dense and obtuse. His
writing quality meets my criteria for literature, his storytelling is
abysmal, but the social relevance is subtle unto sublime.
/"That is, it can be proved rigorously that in every consistent formal
system that contains a certain amount of finitary number theory there
exists undecidable arithmetic propositions and that, moreover, the
consistency of any such system cannot be proved in the system."/
I may just have to replace my previously favorite tagline of /"I know
you believe you understand what you think I said, but you may not
realize that what you heard is not what I meant"/ with this one!
- Steve
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