Chris Weimer

Sorry Riverwind, I wasn't singling you out, you said exactly what I wanted to address in perfect words.

Once again, what can you make of its structure? Where is the piece drawing its sources from? Who is the author? 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?

What sort of language is the text? Does it look like translation-speak? If not, where can you place the author? If so, where can you place the author?

Mathetes

I have no idea what this is about, but...

Since it looks like some kind of tortured existencialist paragraph, and a part of a dialogue or a monologue in which the second person is implied, it could be from Camus's La Chute. I cannot check it right now.

Kevin

It's possible to search certain texts through online through Amazon. You don't even have to be signed in as a member. Just searching for one of the words of the passage, "phony", didn't turn up anything in the entirety of The Fall (trans. Justin O'Brien, in a reprint of the 1956 first edition), so chances are your guess is wrong.

But it was a good guess, considering the tone of the passage. For my part, I can't believe I ever found stuff like this to be interesting reading.

HeretiKc

Wasn't going to respond to this, but seeing the lack of other responses, I may as well give it a shot.

As a few others have picked up on, I'm thinking this is decidedly modern--more specifically, post-1950s, to set somewhat of an arbitrary date (but for which hopefully I'll present some permissible evidence for).

Comments such as and (or, phrased more naturally, something like ) immediately signal someone involved in theological studies--further defined, someone involved with (very) modern secularism. The latter comment has, for lack of a better term, a type of ultra-modernist cynicism, seeming to imply that a large amount of religious believers themselves hold their beliefs only loosely, perhaps based more on social convention than actual conviction. Again, as a few others have hypothesized, this obviously may lead one to believe that it may be someone tied to this very community.

The voice in lines such as "And what of faith? Have I none..." and "But I live yet" certainly could give the impression of 19th century or so, giving rise to Dostoevsky guesses, or guesses of other existential authors. But considering the further context in which these phrases appear, it seems to me that these phrases are not used as the author's natural speech--that is, these phrases are not natural colloquialisms of an early author's time; rather, these are purposeful Emersonian throwbacks, designed to give the modernist dialogue a sense of romanticism, and further beauty.

The "best in my field" reference has to imply either a scientist or someone involved in the more methodological of soft sciences (if that makes sense)--I'm thinking textual critic, further giving weight to the idea that it is someone tied to these parts. I don't know if this is within the scope of what is accepted hypothesizing, but I most certainly Googled these phrases, with nothing comes up--which leads to me to believe that this was perhaps extracted from an archived Usenet conversation or something, or perhaps even Chris's personal correspondences (or Chris himself?).

Jabu Khan

Jean Paul Sartre? "Being and Nothingness" perhaps.

HeretiKc

Oh, wow--I forgot that Chris said that this was a known work. Scratch those last couple of lines.

HeretiKc

If spoken by a philosopher, I was thinking someone like Derrida or Foucault... Philosophy certainly would qualify as an area of study where many strive to be the "best in the field".

(And the hypothesis of Sartre or Derrida would bring in the translation issue...)

But I highly doubt Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, or any modern philosopher would say something like "And these tears I shed every night contain some glimmer of hope".

youngalexander

Jesus speak!
Paraphrased, condensed, but Jesus speak.

I lack the erudition to connect the the references, but Jesus speak for all that.

HeretiKc

No way--little of it fits, if any. Paul may have been a better contender--but this is definitely a modern.

neilgodfrey

i suspect a bit of doggeral from author chris weiner himself, but whatever --

what interests me is that this little game supports the position of that critique that insists that it is pointless to rely on or draw definitive conclusions from texts about which we are ignorant of author, provenance and date.

Neil Godfrey

http://vridar.wordpress.com