HALP IM DROWNING IN TITLES
So I'm paying my dissertation filing fee and turning in forms either tomorrow or Monday, and I'm having second thoughts about the title that will appear on the forms. It's been Aura and the Automaton for quite a while now, and as I rewrite the introduction and think about the whole project, it's seeming to not quite express what I'm saying anymore. The CROWD is missing. So what about this: The Automaton of the Crowd. Bleah, awkward (though it does get the Poe/Baudelaire reference in there). The Crowded Automaton. Waiter, there's a mixed metaphor in my soup. The Crowd in the Machine?
Gah.
In other news, I found yet another candidate for epigraphy:
"Now then, my good friend, you are in possession of all you require to understand my point. We see how, in the organic world, as reflection grows darker and weaker, grace emerges ever more radiant and supreme. - But just as two intersecting lines, converging on one side of a point, reappear on the other after their passage through infinity, and just as our image, as we approach a concave mirror, vanishes to infinity only to reappear before our very eyes, so will grace, having likewise traversed the infinite, return to us once more, and so appear most purely in that bodily form that has either no consciousness at all or an infinite one, which is to say, either in the puppet or a god."
"That means," said I, somewhat amused, "that we would have to eat of the tree of knowledge a second time to fall back into the state of innocence."
"Of course," he answered, "and that is the final chapter in the history of the world."
Kleist, On the Puppet Theater
Gah.
In other news, I found yet another candidate for epigraphy:
"Now then, my good friend, you are in possession of all you require to understand my point. We see how, in the organic world, as reflection grows darker and weaker, grace emerges ever more radiant and supreme. - But just as two intersecting lines, converging on one side of a point, reappear on the other after their passage through infinity, and just as our image, as we approach a concave mirror, vanishes to infinity only to reappear before our very eyes, so will grace, having likewise traversed the infinite, return to us once more, and so appear most purely in that bodily form that has either no consciousness at all or an infinite one, which is to say, either in the puppet or a god."
"That means," said I, somewhat amused, "that we would have to eat of the tree of knowledge a second time to fall back into the state of innocence."
"Of course," he answered, "and that is the final chapter in the history of the world."
Kleist, On the Puppet Theater