Stella Maris & The Passenger

[Anonymous No.21552599]

Some loosely related thoughts:

For all her solipsism and her wishing to have never existed — and all the pain it caused her — she still wore the red sash so that she would be found. A final, heartbreaking plea for a shared reality and a chance for something of herself to mean something to another person.

I've thought about the differences between math and science before, but before reading SM never did I consider that reality could be considered a "mathematics", where each perception is an axiom, and we may learn what is true if these perceptions are assumed to be true. If that makes any sense, solipsism is very similar to being concerned about the ontological status of mathematics, and Alicia is both of those things.

About her thesis:
>What was wrong with it was that while it proved three problems in topos theory it then set about dismantling the mechanism of the proofs. Not to show that these particular proofs were wrong but that any such proofs ignored their own case. Addressing along the way the more commonly argued claims of mathematical reality.
I'm somewhat familiar with rigorous, pure mathematics. What could it mean for a proof to "ignore its own case"? Is this just gibberish from McCarthy? I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

[Anonymous No.21552605]

That quote is from p151 (American edition, hardcover)

[Anonymous No.21552747]

>>21552599
I think it meant that the proofs weren't capable of self-reflection in the same way the paradox of abnormal sets caused us to change the definition of what a set even means. I think what McCarthy is saying across these two books that our knowledge exists and verified within the same system which it builds. It cannot claim truth. Gödel's Incompleteness theorem also put forth a similar argument.

[Anonymous No.21552839]

Stella Maris sucked, where are the cowboys?
and why did a guy with a style that de-emphasises dialogue write a whole book about a teenage girl talking to a Jewish shrink

[Anonymous No.21553149]

>>21552747
Yeah, and I think it's a big source of turmoil for Alicia. It's hard for me to imagine someone being so distraught at the idea of solipsism, but I saw someone on the McCarthy subreddit explain in detail how Alicia is eerily similar to her (or him, not sure): studied math, eventually deeply disillusioned with and disturbed by the apparent lack of relevance of it, more or less. It makes me wonder if her pain could be traced better to other, more personal events. But it's hard to read between the lines, and she's intentionally misleading and obtuse with Cohen, and of course, a lot of the dialogue is about McCarthy's ideas of the unconscious, which don't bear much on her character AFAICT.

>>21552839
I think you're mostly joking, but I'd believe that you didn't enjoy Stella Maris much. Did you like the Passenger better?

[Anonymous No.21553159]

>>21552839
>Stella Maris sucked, where are the cowboys?
Why did I laugh so hard at this

[Anonymous No.21553177]

>>21553149
Orpheus (the booktuber) observed that many of Alicia's ideas are divergent with McCarthy's own. They do share the same interests though.