The Creation of Eden

le  premier  soleil   sur le  premier  matin

-- Charles Péguy, Eve

Subsequent manifestations:

By this time, the eastern sky  was gorgeous with light

-- Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917)

Even before the sun gave light, dead day was creeping  from bush to bush,  watching man.

-- Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

the washed-out, bird-bedeviled dawn

-- T.  Coraghessan Boyle,  World’s End (1987), p. 17

Intruding Light

She woke up in time to see this sun sending up spies ahead of him  to mark out the road through the dark.  He peeped up over the door-sill of the world  and made a little foolishness with red.  But pretty soon, he laid all that aside, and went about his business  dressed all in white.

-- Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

A thin needle of sunshine

came probing in

between the drawn curtains.

-- Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (1928), p.  240

Nightfall

the twilight-loving bats    begin to flit about

-- Washington Irving ,“The Legend of the Enchanted Soldier”, in The Alhambra (1832)

The shadows of the valley

grew deeper and deeper,

until all was dark.

-- Washington Irving ,“The Legend of the Moor’s Legacy”, in The Alhambra (1832)

They sat on the boarding-house porch  and saw the sun plunge  into the same crack in the earth  from which the night emerged.

-- Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Tautologies in action

A bare tautology like “Business is business”, as a free-standing statement, invite contentful interpretation via a “Gricean implicature” (specifically, the Maxim of Quantity).   The following is a syntactically more complex case, where the tautology is embedded in a subordinate clause:

Ever since self was self, nature been keepin’ folks off of red-hot stoves.

-- Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

The meaning is:  Common sense has been extant  from time immemorial.  Operationally, the (tongue-in-cheek) interpretation is:  Go back and back in time, sampling as you go. For each sample-point, verify whether  “self = self” holds at that time; and if so, then evaluate “Common Sense is in effect? Y/N”.   If the answer is Yes each time, then the corelation holds.

The sentence, for all its folksiness, has a kind of philosophy-class spin to it; the moreso as “self = self” calls up First-Order Logic with Identity.

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

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