God-concepts built by deleting limitations — E&M's infinity/divinity analogy glossed live, with the Kroneckerian…
echoes
From: Caleb Crain interviews DFW, raw cassette (Oct 17, 2003) — tape diff vs the printed Boston Globe Approaching Infinity
- Early text:
[scene] Asked about the E&M passage observing that
the parallels with familiar conceptions of God are plain, Wallace
glosses it: in the
anthropology of religion you assemble an idea of God by subtracting
every limitation and flaw the world shows you, and infinity is
the same move — everything is limited; imagine something without
that. He then voices the deflationary counter himself: a Kroneckerian
would say infinity and God are the same sort of thing, wishful
castles built by people who never came to terms with limit's
inescapability,
a unicorn assembled from glued-together concepts
[side 2, 00:16:15–00:17:23]
- IJ echo: Gately's higher-power struggle and the novel's pragmatic,
relationship-not-doctrine theology (the same tape's Gately block
above); the archive's theology thread (
theology-sin-salvation,
Braithwaite apparatus)
- Weight: shared-preoccupation