A lunar tautology

Usually there is a summary “That’s that” finality to tautologies, whether used informatively or not;  stylistically, they are bare-bones.  But consider this:

Herod:  The moon has a strange look tonight. … She reels through the clouds like a drunken woman. … Does she not reel like a drunken woman?  She is like a madwoman, is she not?

Herodias:  No;  the moon is like the moon, that is all.

-- Oscar Wilde, Salomé (1891)

Here the barrenness of the pale white, plain round  far-floating body, is reflected in the unyielding tautological formula.



[For the essay to which the above is an appendix, see this:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2020/05/informative-tautologies-updated.html  ]

Last-Light Tableaux

like

black    lakes

  troubled by

fantastic moons

-- Oscar Wilde, Salomé (1891)

The sun had sunk now  to the line of woodland;

all the opposing slope was already in twilight,

but the lakes below us   were aflame.

-- Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (1945)

“Dorian Gray” monostich

~

noiselessly,  with silver feet, the shadows crept in from the garden

~

 

[Edited slightly   minimalism causâ.]

On Excessively General Questions (further generalized)

In our essay, “On What There Is”,  we confessed ourselves unequal to the task of addressing the question of Being, bare.   Compare further:

You asked me the use of criticism.  You might just as well have asked me  the use of thought.

-- Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist” (1891)

Bizarrely, though the question was meant satirically, that very phrase occurs as a chapter-title in a book written by the philosopher and historian Ernest Gellner  in all seriousness:  “The Uses of Thought”.

The succeeding chapter-titles are equally grandiose:  “The Uses of Doubt”, and “The Stuff of Change”.  This occur in his volume from 1964, the even grander Thought and Change.  Yet this is odd, since Gellner’s general thrust  is deflationary.

Cf. also the classic Heideggerian title, Was heisst denken?, to which we have often had occasion to allude.