Sometimes an author reaches a limit of what he is able to explain or account for within a given text. Discussing time travel paradoxes, Manse Everard of the Time Patrol breaks off and says:
"'I hope you understand what I'm saying. I don't.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, July 1991), PART SIX, 18,244 B. C., II, p. 304.
His fellow agent, Komozino, helpfully adds:
"'It requires a metalanguage and metalogic accessible to few intellects...'" (ibid.)
- and besides:
"'We haven't time to quibble about theory.'" (ibid.)
So the text can move on to practical matters! (But one thing that they do have is time. Komozino might already have spent weeks, months or years of her lifespan on their current problem. Anderson's characters have come a long way from Wells' Time Traveller and his outer narrator wondering about curious possibilities of anachronism and of utter confusion.)
When Valgard asks Illrede about the new god, the troll-king replies:
"'Best not speak of mysteries we cannot understand.'"
-The Broken Spear, XIII, p. 92.
Indeed, none of us can understand such a mixing of mythologies!
In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: The Wake (New York, 1997):
"...there are some powers that no one, not even the Endless, seeks to inquire into deeply." (p. 17, panel 4)
Why not?
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Of course, knowledge in itself is a good thing. The means used for gaining knowledge can be bad (as in the grotesque Soviet and Nazi medical "experiments"). Or knowledge can be used for bad ends.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: Barbara Hambly once had a doctor who experimented on slaves, dissecting them -- and her protagonist is severely tempted by the results of the investigations, which show unprecedented accuracy.
If I do a web search on "hypothermia experiments holocaust", here are a few of the results.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199005173222006
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation
There still seems to be argument over whether it is ethical to use the data from such experiments and also whether the experiments were done in such a way as to make the data actually useful.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Jim!
Mr. Stirling: Alas, I only read three of Barbara Hambly's books: THOSE WHO HUNT THE NIGHT, TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD, and SEARCH THE SEVEN HILLS (where one of the early popes was an important character). So, I'm not familiar with the example you cited. However abominable the means used for gathering that knowledge, I believe Hambly's character could make use of that knowledge for legitimate ends, because he was not the guilty doctor.
As so often Anderson touched on that idea himself, in THE DEVIL'S GAME. The villain, Sunderland Haverner, wished that if the Nazi "researchers" were going to be so cruel anyway, that they had carried out genuinely scientific studies, not exercises in sadism.
Jim: I would say the data should be used. If the bell cannot be unrung there's no point ignoring that data, if valid. I don't expect most doctors, if not abortionists, to be like those Nazi "researchers."
Ad astra! Sean
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