They're the product of a few chance attractors in flesher neurophysiology. Whenever a more complex or subtle story was disseminated through an oral culture, it would eventually degenerate into an archetypal narrative. Once writing was invented, they were only ever created deliberately by fleshers who failed to understand what they were. If all of antiquity's greatest statues had been dropped into a glacier, they would have been reduced to a predictable spectrum of spheroidal pebbles by now; that does not make the spheroidal pebble the pinnacle of the artform. What you've created is not only devoid of truth, it's devoid of aesthetic merit.From: "The Planck Dive" by Greg Egan
"There is always an easy solution to every complex problem--neat, plausible, and wrong."
"The secret of the universe is this: The universe doesn't care. That part of the job is yours."
-- H. L. Mencken
—- David Gerrold
"Wonder, connected with a principle of rational curiosity, is the source of all knowledge and discovery... but wonder which ends in wonder, and is satisfied with wonder, is the quality of an idiot."
-- Samuel Horsley
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2007-03-18
Do you have any idea what archetypal narratives are?
Perhaps a bit harsh, but the character on the receiving end of this tirade had really been asking for it:
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For some reason this entry is attracting a lot of SPAM. Weird.
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