From: Alex David Groce <Alex_Groce@gs246.sp.cs.cmu.edu>
Subject: Re: (urth) the point of it all
Date: Tue, 09 Nov 1999 10:25:08 

>It's very Asian, almost Zen - the meaning of life is meaninglessness. The 
>storytelling contest has no end - and that IS the end.

Ah, perhaps--but I think a better statement for Wolfe's work would be:  the
meaning of life is that there's a lot more meaning to life than you're ever 
likely to manage to grasp -- the story goes on and on and on -- and that IS not
the end*.

* But hints of eschatology lurk in the background, so it's not an Arabian 
nightmare kind of "there is no end"--there is and end, the line that Dr. Talos
talks about in "Of Bad Gold and Burning", my favorite chapter of CITADEL.


"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." John 8:32
--
Alex David Groce (agroce+@cs.cmu.edu)
Ph.D. Student, Carnegie Mellon University - Computer Science Department
8112 Wean Hall (412)-268-3066
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~agroce

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/