Notes on

Literary and Philosophical Puzzles

by Steven H. Cullinane

December 2, 2002

Pilate's Question

As Christmas, for some the high point of the liturgical year, approaches, consider the two following quotations from professors at the University of Toronto, former academic home of Robertson Davies and Marshall McLuhan.

From a professor of geometry at Toronto:

There is a pleasantly discursive treatment of Pontius Pilate's unanswered question "What is truth?"

-- H. S. M. Coxeter, 1987, introduction to Richard J. Trudeau's remarks on the "Story Theory" of truth as opposed to the "Diamond Theory" of truth in The Non-Euclidean Revolution

From a professor of semiotics at Toronto:

One of the most famous anagrams of all time was constructed in the Middle Ages. The unknown author contrived it as a Latin dialogue between Pilate and Jesus. Jesus' answer to Pilate's question "What is truth?" is phrased as an ingenious anagram of the letters of that very question: Pilate: Quid est veritas? ("What is truth?") Jesus: Est virqui adest. ("It is the man before you.")

-- Marcel Danesi, publisher's website for a newly published book, The Puzzle Instinct

For some less flippant remarks on geometry, semiotics, and theology (not from the University of Toronto) see my note Logos and Logic.

November 23, 2002... The title is from Carl Sagan's Contact.

The Artist's Signature

"There might be a game in which paper figures were put together to form a story, or at any rate were somehow assembled. The materials might be collected and stored in a scrap-book, full of pictures and anecdotes. The child might then take various bits from the scrap-book to put into the construction; and he might take a considerable picture because it had something in it which he wanted and he might just include the rest because it was there.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief

“Not games. Puzzles. Big difference. That’s a whole other matter. All art — symphonies, architecture, novels — it’s all puzzles. The fitting together of notes, the fitting together of words have by their very nature a puzzle aspect. It’s the creation of form out of chaos. And I believe in form.”

— Stephen Sondheim, in Stephen Schiff, “Deconstructing Sondheim,” The New Yorker, March 8, 1993, p. 76

    "All goods in this world, all beauties, all truths, are diverse and partial aspects of one unique good. Therefore they are goods which need to be ranged in order. Puzzle games are an image of this operation. Taken all together, viewed from the right point and rightly related, they make an architecture. Through this architecture the unique good, which cannot be grasped, becomes apprehensible.
    All architecture is a symbol of this, an image of this.
    The entire universe is nothing but a great metaphor."

    — Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks, p. 98, quoted in Gateway to God, p. 42, paperback, fourth impression, printed in Glasgow in 1982 by Fontana Books

"He would leave enigmatic messages on blackboards, signed Ya Ya Fontana."

— Brian Hayes on John Nash, The Sciences magazine, Sept.-Oct., 1998

November 23, 2002

A Puzzlement

The Diamond 16 Puzzle presents a whole that is in some sense more than the sum of its parts, a whole that satisfies Joyce's aesthetic criteria: integritas, consonantia, claritas. For a related puzzle of a more literary sort that reflects the fragmentary nature of experience, try to satisfy these criteria by fitting together the following pieces:

Symmetry, by Hermann Weyl,
A Beautiful Mind, by Sylvia Nasar,
The Hollow Man, by Dan Simmons,
"Endgame," by Steven H. Cullinane (Nov. 7, 1986),
"Shine on, You Crazy Diamond," by Pink Floyd
"Kristallnacht 1989," by the German people, starring the Berlin Wall,
"The Cruciatus Curse," starring Martin Sheen in the National Cathedral,
"The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?" by Edward Albee, starring Sally Field,
" Election Night," by Aaron Sorkin, starring Martin Sheen, and
"Apocalypse Now," by John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola, starring Marlon Brando,

For a set of 5 weblog entries that attempt a solution of this literary puzzle, click here.

November 23, 2002

The Artist's Signature, Part II

Eleanor Arroway's loss of her father in Carl Sagan's novel Contact suggests the musical question "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" Sagan's unsatisfactory answer involves the discovery of a literal circle coded deep within the digits of pi. Sagan's nonsense may prompt some elderly atheists to recall Joe Hill's musical dogma "You'll Get Pie in the Sky When You Die -- It's a Lie." Can this clash between Carter family values and the Wobblies be resolved?

For a set of 7 weblog entries that address this theological puzzle, click here.

For a somewhat deeper discussion of literature and theology, see

Logos and Logic.

View current Log24.net web journal. Page last updated Dec. 4, 2002. Created Nov. 23, 2002.