Culture · Books
Reading Gödel, Escher, Bach for the third time, and finally getting the joke
I've owned this book for eleven years. Two of those attempts ended at page ninety. Here's what changed, and why the dialogues are the actual argument.
Every few years I pick this book up believing I am now a person who finishes it. Twice I was wrong in the same place, around the dialogue with the crab, where the cleverness stopped feeling like an invitation and started feeling like a locked door.
What changed on the third attempt was that I stopped treating the dialogues as decoration between the chapters. They are not breaks. They are the argument, acted out, and the chapters are the footnotes.
Notes to expand later
- The recursion jokes are load-bearing.
- Reading it slowly is not a virtue, it is a requirement.
- I still do not fully follow the formal system chapters, and I have made peace with that.