J R (American Literature)

by William Gaddis

And then this problem came up over money, instead of paying Father Ira gave him an old violin and he took it down to the barn to try to learn to play it. Well his father heard it and went right down, and broke the violin over Father’s head. We were a Quaker family, after all, where you just didn’t do things that didn’t pay.

My goodness, only on page 3, and already had a big laugh.

has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you’re not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of the knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it’s exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos .

This is uttered by the physics teacher, Jack Gibbs. It's the post=WW II era, and the education system is enamored with introducing tech into the classroom as a teaching tool (sound familiar?), in this case lectures delivered over TV. After the comment above, Gibbs shuts off a TV lesson, teaching outdated Newtonian physics, and goes on to explain the nature of entropy to the students. A theme throughout JR. Source: Fiction in the Quantum Universe (Susan Strehle)

if somebody in this class could stop fighting off the idea of trying to think.