Re: bad poetry?

The search for enlightenment itself is a search for some general truth, a general principle of happiness - for Seymour, the omnipresence of some concept of God in all people and objects. That is a generalization, and Seymour was no idiot. People on a similar quest for a universal principle of happiness are not idiots, so considering this, one might conclude that Blake was incorrect. (And if he didn't take into account the search for enlightenment as one kind of generalization, then he was generalizing about his own definition of it, so that makes him an "idiot" by his own standards. If you think about it, that whole quote is a generalization!)

I know you would consider this all another "internal contradiction," Jim, and that would be fair, if the contradictions I point out weren't significant to understanding Seymour, and I was just trying to be a jerk about it.

But they are very significant, because they are real in Seymour's world. Seymour could not possibly exist in a world, where the need for discrimination made his enlightenment impossible. Salinger almost presents his suicide as rational, but viewed in light of "internal contradictions" to his enlightenment philosophy, it might be considered more inevitable.

Am I way off here, or is that an understanding of Seymour some of y'all have gotten from this discussion?

luke

-------Original Message-------
From: Jim Rovira <jrovira@drew.edu>
Sent: 07/03/03 08:33 PM
To: bananafish@roughdraft.org
Subject: Re: bad poetry?

>
> You're not paying attention, Luke, still trying to establish internal
contradictions. The principle of non-discrimination, I said in my last
post, was not a generic principle, so can fairly be applied to some
"objects" and not applied to others, using the word "objects" in the
most generic sense possible (to apply to things and ideas and anything
immaterial that exists).

So Seymour could refuse to discriminate between people and between
poetry but still discriminate between ideas.

"To generalize is to be an idiot"

-William Blake

Jim

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Received on Fri Jul 4 03:13:27 2003