ABSTRACT
The joco-serious paradox operates across limits, and paradox loves limits—beginnings, as in the Creation, where nothing becomes something, and eternity becomes for man’s measurement time; ends, where something becomes nothing again, or time loses itself eternity. Illusion of any kind may involve paradox, particularly the paradoxes of relativity, in the sense that one thinks that something is real when in fact another thing is the reality. One important part of such recreations was mathematics, and there were many mathematical paradoxes, puzzles, and ‘impossibilities,’ to which great mathematicians from antiquity to the present had contributed. The poet’s task was to recreate those marvellous discords with his rhetoric, and the natural scientist’s to recreate them in his technological language of things. Paradox and deceit in mathematics and science tend to lose their playfulness and their mysteriousness in the course of seventeenth-century thought.
