“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Great Crack Up” (1936)
“You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you.”
—Carly Simon (1971)
On a December morning in 1947 when three fellows at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study set out for the Third Circuit Court in Trenton, it was decided that the job of making sure that the brilliant but naively innocent logician Kurt Gödel didn’t say something intemperate at his citizenship hearing would fall to Albert Einstein. Economist Oscar Morgenstern would drive, Einstein rode shotgun, and a nervous Gödel sat in the back. With squibs of low winter light, both wave and particle, dappled across the rattling windows of Morgenstern’s car, Einstein turned back and asked, “Now, Gödel, are you really well prepared for this examination?” There had been no doubt that the philosopher had adequately studied, but as to whether it was proper to be fully honest was another issue. Less than two centuries before, and the signatories of the U.S. Constitution had supposedly crafted a document defined by separation of powers and coequal government, checks and balances, action and reaction. “The science of politics,” wrote Alexander Hamilton in “Federalist Paper No. 9,” “has received great improvement,” though as Gödel discovered, clearly not perfection. With a completism that only a Teutonic logician was capable of, Gödel had carefully read the foundational documents of American political theory, he’d poured over the Federalist Papers and the Constitution, and he’d made an alarming discovery.
It’s believed that while studying Article V, the portion that details the process of amendment, Gödel realized that there was no safeguard against that article itself being amended. Theoretically, a sufficiently powerful political movement with legislative and executive authority could rapidly amend the articles of amendment so that a potential demagogue would be able to rule by fiat, all while such tyranny was perfectly constitutional. A paradox at the heart of the Constitution—something that supposedly guaranteed democracy having coiled within it rank authoritarianism. All three men driving to Trenton had a keen awareness of tyranny; all were refugees from Nazi Germany; all had found safe-haven on the pristine streets of suburban Princeton. After the Anschluss, Gödel was a stateless man, and though raised Protestant he was suspect by the Nazis and forced to emigrate. Gödel, with his wife, departed Vienna by the Trans-Siberian railroad, crossed from Japan to San Francisco, and then took the remainder of his sojourn by train to Princeton. His path had been arduous and he’d earned America, so when Gödel found a paradox at the heart of the Constitution, his desire to rectify it was born from patriotic duty. At the hearing, the judge asked Gödel how it felt to become a citizen of a nation where it was impossible for the government to fall into anti-democratic tyranny. But it could, Gödel told him, and “I can prove it.” Apocryphally, Einstein kicked the logician’s chair and ended that syllogism.
Born in Austria-Hungary, citizen of Czechoslovakia, Austria, Germany, and finally the United States, Gödel’s very self-definition was mired in incompleteness, contradiction, and unknowability. From parsing logical positivism among luminaries such as Rudolph Carnap and Moritz Schlick, enjoying apfelstrudel and espresso at the Café Reichsrat on Rathausplatz while they discussed the philosophy of mathematics, Gödel now rather found himself eating apple pie and weak coffee in the Yankee Doodle Tap Room on Nassau Street—and he was grateful. Gone were the elegant Viennese wedding-cake homes of the Ringstrasse, replaced with Jersey’s clapboard colonials; no more would Gödel debate logic among the rococo resplendence of the University of Vienna, but at Princeton he was at least across the hall from Einstein. “The Institute was to be a new kind of research center,” writes Ed Regis in Who Got Einstein’s Office?: Eccentricity and Genius at the Institute for Advanced Study. “It would have no students, no teachers, and no classes,” the only responsibility being pure thought, so that its fellows could be purely devoted to theory. Its director J. Robert Oppenheimer (of Manhattan Project fame) called it an “intellectual hotel;” physicist Richard Feynman was less charitable, referring to it as a “lovely house by the woods” for “poor bastards” no longer capable of keeping up. Regardless, it was to be Gödel’s final home, and there was something to that.
Seventeen years before his trip to Trenton, and it was at the Café Reichsrat where he presented the discovery for which he’d forever be intractably connected—Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems. In 1930 he had irrevocably altered mathematics when Gödel demonstrated that the dream of completism that had dogged deduction since antiquity was only a mirage. “Any consistent formal system,” argues Gödel in his first theorem, “is incomplete… there are statements of the language… which can neither be proved nor disproved.” In other words, it’s an impossibility that any set of axioms can be demonstrated to be true as part of a self-contained system—the rationalist dream of a unified, self-evidently provable system is only so much fantasy. Math, it turns out, will never be depleted, since there can never be a solution to all mathematical problems. In Gödel’s formulation, a system must either sometimes produce falsehoods, or it must sometimes generate unprovable truths, but it can never consistently render only completely provable truths. As the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter explained in his countercultural classic Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, “Relying on words to lead you to the truth is like relying on an incomplete formal system to lead you to the truth. A formal system will give you some truth, but… a formal system, no matter how powerful—cannot lead to all truths.” In retrospect, the smug certainties of American exceptionalism should have been no match for Gödel, whose scalpel-like mind had already eviscerated mathematics, philosophy, and logic, to say nothing of some dusty parchment once argued over in Philadelphia.
His theorems rest on a variation of what’s known as the “Liar’s Paradox,” which asks what the logical status of a proposition such as “This statement is false” might be. If that sentence is telling the truth, then it must be false, but if it’s false, then it must be true, ad infinitum, in an endless loop. For Gödel, that proposition is amended to “This sentence is not provable,” with his reasoning demonstrating that a sufficiently formal system of logic can’t demonstrate that proposition, regardless of its truth value, since to prove the statement is to make it unprovable, but if unprovable, then it’s proved, again ad infinitum in yet another grueling loop. As with the Constitution and its paeans to democracy, so must mathematics be rendered perennially useful while still falling short of perfection. The elusiveness of certainty bedeviled Gödel throughout his life; a famously paranoid man, the assassination of his friend Schlick by a Nazi student in 1936 pushed the logician into a scrupulous anxiety. After the death of his best friend Einstein in 1955 he became increasingly isolated. “Gödel’s sense of intellectual exile deepened,” explains Rebecca Goldstein in Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel. “The young man in the dapper white suit shriveled into an emaciated man, entombed in a heavy overcoat and scarf even in New Jersey’s hot humid summers, seeing plots everywhere… His profound isolation, even alienation, from his peers provided fertile soil for that rationality run amuck which is paranoia.” When his beloved wife fell ill in 1977, Gödel quit eating since she could no longer prepare his meals. The ever-logical man whose entire career had demonstrated the fallibility of rationality had concluded that only his wife could be trusted not to poison his food, and so when she was unable to cook, he properly reasoned (by the axioms that were defined) that it made more sense to simply quit eating. When he died, Gödel weighed only 50 pounds.
Gödel’s thought was enmeshed in that orphan of logic that we call paradox. As was Einstein’s, that man who converted time into space and space into time, who explained how energy and mass were the same thing so that (much to his horror) the apocalyptic false dawn of Hiroshima was the result. Physics in the 20th century had cast off the intuitive coolness of classical mechanics, discovering that contradiction studded the foundation of reality. There was Werner Heisenberg with his uncertainty over the location of individual subatomic particles, Louis de Broglie and the strange combination of wave and particle that explained the behavior of light, Niels Bohr who understood atomic nuclei as if they were smeared across space, and the collapsing wave functions of Erwin Schrödinger for whom it could be imagined that a hypothetical feline was capable of being simultaneously alive and dead. Science journalist John Gribbin explains in Schrödinger’s Kittens and the Search for Reality: Solving the Quantum Mysteries that contemporary physics is defined by “paradoxical phenomena as photons (particles of light) that can be in two places at the same time, atoms that go two ways at once… [and how] time stands still for a particle moving at light speed.” Western thought has long prized logical consistency, but physics in the 20th century abolished all of that in glorious absurdity, and from those contradictions emerged modernity—the digital revolution, semiconductors, nuclear power, all built on paradox.
The keystone of classical logic is the so-called “Law of Non-Contradiction.” Simply put, something cannot both be and not be what it happens to be simultaneously, or if symbolic logic is your jam: ¬(p ∧ ¬p), and I promise you that’s the only formula you will see in this essay. Aristotle said that between two contradictory statements one must be correct and the other false—”it will not be possible to be and not to be the same thing” he writes in The Metaphysics—but the anarchic potential of the paradox greedily desires truth and its antecedents. And again, in the 17th century the philosopher Wilhelm Gottfried Leibnitz tried to succinctly ward off contradiction in his New Essays on Human Understanding when he declared, “Every judgement is either true or false,” and yet paradoxes fill the history of metaphysics like landmines studded across the Western Front. Paradox is the great counter-melody of logic—it is the question of whether an omnipotent God could will Himself unable to do something, and it’s the eye-straining M.C. Escher lithograph “Waterfall” with its intersecting Penrose triangles showing a stream cascading from an impossible trough. Paradox is the White Queen’s declaration in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass that “sometimes I believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” and the Church Father Tertullian’s creedal statement that “I believe it because it is absurd.” The cracked shadow logic of our intellectual tradition, paradox is confident though denounced by philosophers as sham-faced; it is troublesome and not going anywhere. When a statement is made synonymous with its opposite, then traditional notions of propriety are dispelled and the fun can begin. “But one must not think ill of the paradox,” writes Søren Kierkegaard in Philosophical Fragments, “for the paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion: a mediocre fellow.”
As a concept, it may have found its intellectual origin on the sunbaked, dusty, scrubby, hilly countryside of Crete. The mythic homeland of the Minotaur, who is man and beast, human and bull, a walking, thinking, raging horned paradox covered in cowhide and imprisoned within the labyrinth. Epimenides, an itinerant philosopher some seven centuries before Christ, supposedly said that “All Cretans are liars” (St. Paul actually quotes this assertion in his epistle to Titus). A version of the aforementioned Liar’s Paradox thus ensues. If Epimenides is telling the truth then he is lying, and if he is lying then he is telling the truth. This class of paradoxes has multiple variations (in the Middle Ages they were known as “insolubles”—the unsolvable). For example, consider two sentences vertically arranged; the upper one is written “The statement below is true” and the lower says “The statement above is false,” and again the reader is caught in a maddening feedback loop. Martin Gardner, who for several decades penned the delightful “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American, asks in Aha! Gotcha: Paradoxes to Puzzle and Delight, “Why does this form of the paradox, in which a sentence talks about itself, make the paradox clearer? Because it eliminates all ambiguity over whether a liar always lies and a truth-teller always tells the truth.” The paradox is a function of language, and in that way is the cousin to tautology, save for the former describing propositions that are always necessarily both true and false.
Some intrinsic meaning is elusive in all of this this, so that it would be easy to reject all of it as rank stupidity, but paradoxes provide a crucial service. In paradox, we experience the breakdown of language and of literalism. Whether or not paradoxes are glitches in how we arrange our words or due to something more intrinsic, they signify a null-space where the regular ways of thinking, of understanding, of writing, no longer hold. Few crafters of the form are as synonymous with paradox as the fifth-century BCE philosopher Zeno of Elea. Consider his famed dichotomy paradox, wherein Zeno concludes that motion itself must be impossible, since the movement from point A to point B always necessitates a halving of distance, forever (and so the destination itself can never be reached). Or his celebrated arrow paradox, wherein Aristotle explains in Physics that “If everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest at that instant of time, and if that which is in location is always occupying such a space at any moment, the flying arrow is therefore motionless at that instant of time and at the next instant of time.” And yet the arrow still moves. Roy Sorenson explains in A Brief History of the Paradox that the form “developed from the riddles of Greek folklore” (as with the Sphinx’s famous query in Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex), so that words have always mediated these conundrums, while Anthony Gottlieb writes in The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance that “ingenious paradoxes… try to discredit commonsense views by demonstrating that they lead to unacceptable consequences,” in a gambit as rhetorical as it is analytical. Often connected primarily with mathematics and philosophy, paradox is fundamentally a literary genre, and one ironically (or paradoxically?) associated with the failure of language itself. All of the great authors of paradox—the pre-Socratics, Zen masters, Jesus Christ—were at their core storytellers, they were writers. Words stretched to incomprehension and narrative unspooling is their fundamental medium. Epimenides’s utterance triggers a collapse of meaning, but where the literal perishes there is room made for the figurative. Paradox is the mother of poetry.
I’d venture that the contradictions of life are the subject of all great literature, but paradoxes appear in more obvious forms, too. “There was only one catch and that was Catch-22,” writes Joseph Heller. The titular regulation of Heller’s Catch-22 concerned the mental state of American pilots fighting in the Mediterranean during the Second World War, with the policy such that if somebody requests that they don’t want to fly a mission because of mental infirmity, they’ve only demonstrated their own sanity, since anyone who would want to fly must clearly be insane, so that it’s impossible to avoid fighting. The captain was “moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.” Because politics is often the collective social function of reducto ad absurdum, political novels make particularly adept use of paradox. George Orwell did something similar in his celebrated (and oft-misinterpreted) novel of dystopian horror 1984, wherein the state apparatus trumpets certain commandments, such as “War is peace. /Freedom is slavery. /Ignorance is strength.” Perhaps such dialectics are the (non-Marxist) socialist Orwell’s parody of Hegelian double-speak, a mockery of that supposed engine of human progress that goes through thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Within paradox there is a certain freedom, the ability to understand that contradiction is an attribute of our complex experience, but when statements are also defined as their opposite, meaning itself can be the casualty. Paradox understood as a means to enlightenment bestows anarchic freedom; paradox understood as a means unto itself is nihilism.
Political absurdities are born out of the inanity of rhetoric and the severity of regulation, but paradox can entangle not just society, but the fabric of reality as well. Science fiction is naturally adept at examining the snarls of existential paradox, with time travel a favored theme. Paul Nahin explains in Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction that temporal paradoxes are derived from the simple question of “What might happen if a time traveler changed the past?” This might seem an issue entirely of hermetic concern, save for in contemporary physics neither general relativity nor quantum mechanics preclude time travel (indeed certain interpretations of those theories downright necessitate it). So even the idea of being able to move freely through past, present, and future has implications for how reality is constituted, whether or not we happen to be the ones stepping out of the tesseract. “The classic change-the-past paradox is, of course, the so-called grandfather paradox,” writes Nahin, explaining that it “poses the question of what happens if an assassin goes back in time and murders his grandfather before his (the time-travelling murderer’s) own father is born.” The grandfather’s murder requires a murderer, but for the murderer in question to be born there is also the requirement that the grandfather not be murdered, so that the murderer is able to travel back in time and kill his ancestor, and again we’re in a strange loop.
Variations exist as far back as the golden age of the pulps, appearing in magazines like Amazing Stories as early as 1929. More recently, Ray Bradbury explored the paradox in “A Sound of Thunder,” where he is explicit about the paradoxical implications that any travel to the past will alter the future in baroque ways, with a 21st century tourist accidentally killing a butterfly in the Cretaceous, leading to the election of an openly fascistic U.S. president millions of years into the future (though the divergence of parallel universes is often proffered as a means of avoiding such implications). In Bradbury’s estimation, every single thing in history, every event, every incident, is “an exquisite thing,” so that a “small thing that could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes all down the years across Time.” This conundrum need not only be phrased in patricidal terms, for what all temporal paradoxes have at their core is an issue of causality—if we imagine that time progresses from past through future, then what happens when those terms get all mixed up? How can we possibly understand a past that’s influenced by a future that in turn has been affected by the past?
Again, no issue of scholastic quibbling, for though we experience time as moving forward like one of Zeno’s arrows, the physics itself tells us that past, present, and future are constituted in entirely stranger ways. One version of the grandfather paradox involves, rather than grisly murder, the transfer of information from the future to the past; for example, in Tim Powers’s novel The Anubis Gates, a time traveler is stranded in the early 19th century. The character realizes that “I could invent things—the light bulb, the internal combustion engine… flush toilets.” But he abandons this hubris, for “any such tampering might cancel the trip I got here by, or even the circumstances under which my mother and father met.” Many readers will perhaps be aware of temporal paradoxes from the Robert Zemeckis Back to the Future film trilogy (which for what they lack in patricide they make up for in Oedipal sentiments), notably a scene in which Marty McFly inadvertently introduces Chuck Berry to his own song “Johnny B. Goode.” Ignoring the troubling implications that a suburban white teenager had to somehow teach the Black inventor of rock ‘n’ roll his own music, Back to the Future presents a classic temporal paradox—if McFly first heard “Johnny B. Goode” from Berry records, and Berry first heard the song from McFly, then from whence was the song actually composed? (Perhaps from God).
St. Augustine asks in The City of God “What is time, then? If nobody asks me, I know; but if I were desirous to explain it to one who should ask me, I plainly do not know.” Paradox sprouts from the fertile soil of our own incomprehension, and to its benefit there is virtually nothing that humans really understand, at least not really. Time is the oddest thing of all, if we honestly confront the enormity of it. I’m continually surprised that I can’t easily walk into 1992 as if it were a room in my house. No surprise then that time and space are so often explored in the literature of paradox. Oxymoron and irony are the milquetoast cousins of paradox, but poetry at its most polished, pristine, and adamantine elevates contradiction into an almost religious principle. Among the 17th-century poets who worked in the stead of John Donne, paradox was often a central aspect of what critics have called a “metaphysical conceit.” These brilliant, crystalline, rhetorical turns are often like Zeno’s paradoxes rendered into verse, expanding and compressing time and space with a dialectical glee. An example of this from the good Dr. Donne, master of both enigma and the erotic, who in his poem “The Good-Morrow” imagined two lovers for whom they have made “one little room an everywhere.” The narrator and the beloved’s bed-chamber—perhaps there is heavy wooden paneling on the wall and a canopy bed near a fireplace burning green wood, a full moon shining through the mottled crown glass window—are as if a singularity where north, south, east and west; past, present, and future; are all collapsed into a point. Even more obvious is Donne in “The Paradox,” wherein he writes that “Once I loved and died; and am now become/Mine epitaph and tomb;/Here dead men speak their last, and so do I,” the talking corpse its own absurdity made flesh.
So taken were the 20th-century scholars known as the New Critics with the ingenuity of metaphysical conceits that Cleanth Brooks would argue in his classic The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry that the “language of poetry is the language of paradox.” Donne and Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, and Henry Vaughan used paradox as a theme and a subject—but to write poetry itself is paradoxical. To write fiction is paradoxical. Even to write nonfiction is paradoxical. To write at all is paradoxical. A similar sentiment concerning the representational arts is conveyed in the Belgian surrealist painter Rene Magritte’s much parodied 1929 work “The Treachery of Images.” Magritte presents an almost absurdly recognizable smoking pipe, polished to a totemistic brown sheen with a shiny black mouth piece, so basically obvious that it might as well be from an advertisement, and beneath it he writes in cursive script “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”—”This is not a pipe.” A seeming blatant contradiction, for what could the words possibly relate to other than the picture directly above them? But as Magritte told an interviewer, “if I had written on my picture ‘This is a pipe,’ I’d have been lying!” For you see, Magritte’s image is not a pipe, it is an image of a pipe. Like Zeno’s paradoxes, what may first initially seem to be simple-minded contrarianism, a type of existential trolling if you will, belies a more subtle observation. The philosopher Michel Foucault writes in his slender volume This Is Not a Pipe that “Contradiction could exist only between two statements,” but that in the painting “there is clearly but one, and it cannot be contradictory because the subject of the propositions is a simple demonstrative.” According to Foucault, the picture, though self-referential, is not a paradox in the logical sense of the word. And yet there is an obvious contradiction between the viewer’s experience of the painting, and the reality that they’ve not looked upon some carefully carved and polished pipe, but rather only brown and black oil carefully applied to stretched canvas.
This, then, is the “treachery” of which Magritte speaks, the paradox that is gestated within that gulf where meaning resides, a valley strung between the-thing-in-itself and the way in which we represent the-thing-in-itself. Writing is in some ways even more treacherous than painting, for at least Magritte’s picture looks like a pipe—perhaps other than some calligraphic art, literature appears as nothing so much as abstract squiggles. Moby-Dick is not a whale and Jay Gatsby is not a man. They are less than a picture of a pipe, for we have not even images of them, only ink-stained books, and the abject abstraction of mere letters. And yet the paradox is that from that nothingness is generated the most sumptuous something; just as the illusion of painting can trick one into the experience of the concrete, so does the more bizarre phenomenon of the literary imagination make you hallucinate characters that are generated from the non-figurative alphabet. From this essay, if I’ve done even a somewhat adequate job, you’ve hopefully been able to envision Gödel and Einstein bundled into a car on the Jersey turnpike, windows frosted with nervous breath and laughter, the sun rising over the wooded Pine Barrens—or to imagine John and Anne Donne bundled together under an exquisite blanket of red and yellow and blue and green, the heavy oak door of their chamber closed tight against the English frost—but of course you’ve seen no such thing. You’ve only skimmed through your phone while sitting on the toilet, or toggled back and forth between open tabs on your laptop. Literature is paradoxical because it necessitates the invention of entire realities out of the basest nothing; the treachery of representation is that “This is not a pipe” is a principle that applies to absolutely all of the written word, and yet when we read a novel or a poem we can smell the burning tobacco.
All of literature is a great enigma, a riddle, a paradox. What the Zen masters of Japanese Buddhism call a kaon. Religion is too often maligned for being haunted by the hobgoblin straw-man of consistency, and yet the only real faith is one mired in contradiction, and few practices embrace paradox quite like Zen. Central to Zen is the breaking down of the dualities that separate all of us from absolute being, the distinction between the I and the not-I. As a means to do this, Zen masters deploy the enigmatic stories, puzzles, sayings, and paradoxes of kaon, with the goal of forcing the initiate toward the para-logical, a catalyst for the instantaneous enlightenment known as satori. Sometimes reduced to the “What is the sound of one-hand clapping?” variety of puzzle (though that is indeed a venerable kaon), the monk and master D.T. Suzuki explains in An Introduction to Zen Buddhism that these apparently “paradoxical statements are not artificialities contrived to hide themselves behind a screen of obscurity; but simply because the human tongue is not an adequate organ for expressing the deepest truth of Zen, the latter cannot be made the subject of logical exposition; they are to be experienced in the inmost soul when they become for the first time intelligible.” A classic kaon, attributed to the ninth-century Chinese monk Linji Yixuan, famously says “If you meet the Buddha, kill him.” Linji’s point is similar to Magritte’s—”This is not the Buddha.” It’s a warning about falling into the trap of representation, of refusing to resist the treachery of images, and yet the paradox is that the only way we have of communicating is through the fallible, inexact, medium of words. Zen is the only religion whose purpose is to overcome religion, and everything else for that matter. It asks us to use its paradoxes as a ladder to which we can climb toward ultimate being—and then we’re to kick that ladder over. In its own strange way, literature is the ultimate kaon, all of these novels and plays, poems and essays, all words, words, words meaning nothing and signifying everything, gesturing towards a Truth beyond truth, and yet nothing but artfully arranged lies (and even less than that, simply arrayed squiggles on a screen). To read is to court its own type of enlightenment, of transcendence, and not just because of the questions literature raises, but because of literature’s very existence in the first place.
Humans are themselves the greatest of paradoxes: someone who is kind can harbor flashes of rage, the cruelest of people are capable of genuine empathy, our greatest pains often lead to salvation and we’re sometimes condemned by that which we love. In a famous 1817 letter to his brothers, the English Romantic poet John Keats extolled the most sublime of literature’s abilities that was to dwell in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” a quality that he called “negative capability.” An irony in our present’s abandonment of nuance, for ours is a paradoxical epoch through and through—an era of unparalleled technological superiority and appalling barbarity, of instantaneous knowledge and virtually no wisdom. A Manichean age as well—which valorizes consistency above all other virtues, though it is that most suburban of values—yet Keats understood that if we’re to give any credit to literature, and for that matter any credit to people, we must be comfortable with complexity and contradiction. Negative capability is what separates the moral from the merely didactic. In all of our baroque complexity, paradox is the operative mode of literature, the only rhetorical gambit commensurate with displaying the full spectrum of what it means to be a human. We are all such glorious enigmas—creatures of finite dimension and infinite worth. None of us deserve grace, and yet all of us are worthy of it, a moral paradox that makes us beautiful not in spite of its cankered reality, but because of it. The greatest of paradoxes is that within that contradictory form, there is the possibility of genuine freedom—of liberation.
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