In 1977 I sat down in a small theater on the campus of the University of Missouri - Columbia, watched the play Jumpers and was changed for life.
This was just five years after the play opened at the Old Vic with Diana Rigg in the leading role and a mere three years after the play opened on Broadway at the Billy Rose Theater.
Somewhere in the dark, middle of the U.S., I sat in the theater and was transfixed. This was, by far, the smartest thing I ever experienced. It was a perfect melange of the smartest things from history. For example:
It was precisely this notion of infinite series which in the sixth century BC led the Greek philosopher Zeno to conclude that since an arrow shot towards a target first had to cover half the distance, and then half the remainder, and then half the remainder after that, and so on ad infinitum, the result was, as I will now demonstrate, that though an arrow is always approaching its target, it never quite gets there, and Saint Sebastian died of fright.
It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.
How the hell do I know what I find incredible? Credibility is an expanding field... Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight.
Language is a finite instrument crudely applied to an infinity of ideas, and one consequence of the failure to take account of this is that modern philosophy has made itself ridiculous by analysing such statements as, "This is a good bacon sandwich," or, "Bedser had a good wicket."
