Cege

Since this thread first appeared in the Lounge, I'm going to assume (I know, I know...) that the source isn't related to a religious commentary. Also, I'm not a literary scholar.

How about The Great Gatsby?

robto

Chris's comment about "sources" and the feel of the text make me think it has many quoted phrases strung together. Trying a few at random on Google:

"steadfast in peace" turns up rather ancient stuff: Savonarola and the Historia Augusta

"stubborn to death" seems very modern, and often associated with the 1995 movie The Forgotten Toys (the little bear who was stubborn to death). Is it possible that the movie is the source of this phrase?

"believe what you believe what you believe" also seems to be very modern: lyrics from Walkabout, a 1986 album by The Fixx.

Counter to what another poster suggested, this has the feel of a theatrical dialogue to me, rather than a novel. I think it must be a very recent, English language play.

Mathetes

Found it!

It's from Chris Weimers's Opera Magna, "Complete posts in IIDB", volume VIII (2007).

neilgodfrey

What's wrong with tentative knowledge and doubt -- especially in the absence of anything solid? I am often amazed at what seems to be some need to find black and white absolutes where the evidence does not allow them.

But historians and literary scholars do not study texts without first establishing some sort of context. Till then, the loose text without context is at best relegated to a footnote or appendix till further contextual info comes to light.

The reason I suspect a bit of doggeral from Chis Weimer himself is coz i did take 2 minutes to do a bit of "research" on the immediate context/source of this text: Chris Weimer himself. His post history shows he has sent out a similar test before, only in verse, and that did turn out to be something composed by him about some event in his own life. That's the closest I can get to a provenance (and paradoxical or mysterious content) for this text here.

I could be entirely wrong naturally. So I have no interest in taking time on drawing conclusions from a Chris text any more than I would want to take time to speculate on any other text about which I knew nothing. As for the gospels, yes, any "conclusions" I draw from them can only be tentative and conditional upon certain assumptions about evidence for provenance. I find no justification for the dogmatism of the orthodox about these texts -- even though in the case of the gospels we do have some more information, however inexact and broad, about their context. We have absolutely none re Chris's text.

Neil Godfrey

http://vridar.wordpress.com

Rick Sumner

Interestingly enough, Chris himself was my first guess too. The clumsy shift between colloquialism and efforts at sounding profound seems to preclude having read something "quotable" enough to warrant its use in such an excercise. The citation of Socrates smacks of someone eager to work the classics in. The sort of thing we might expect from a classics student. Like Chris Weimer.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

GrandpaMithras

Its Chris. I'll bet the farm. Its a small farm. Mostly ants.

Ecrasez L'infame

I no longer know what to think. The only thing I'm sure of is that it ain't "the Lord of the Rings".

Chris Weimer

I hate to interrupt such awesome divination, but I'd like to reiterate some things:

Once again, what can you make of its structure? Where is the piece drawing its sources from? Who is the author? (And this doesn't necessarily mean identify an historical person who said the lines.) What is his character? Who is he talking to? What is their character? What's the themes? What about literary devices? Techniques? Rhetorical devices? Technique?

So far I've gotten lots of great responses. Some of you are on the right track, others not so right. I'd hate to give away anything more than I have to, so how about figuring out some of that other stuff above?

Thanks to everyone again for playing along.

RED DAVE

Saul Bellow

Ravelstein

RED DAVE

Chris Weimer

Also, is there something of a consensus here? Anyone want to look at statistics? I wouldn't want to do them myself possibly skewing the results.