Chapter 4 - A Word from Pastor Dan

First, Let me start by saying how awkward I found this chapter to read. I found myself needing to back back and re-read pararaphs to find connections. Once I muddled through that, I found one sentence that seemed to summarize the whole idea of the chapter. "He believed that meaning could arise out of chaos." Pastor Dan focuses his article on Burroughs but really the discussion is centered around the ideas of Kant and the formulation of the scientific method and essentially how we think about and approach life in general.

The most interesting portion of the chapter to me was when the author was describing how Burroughs believed there was "room for surprise" and developed the "celebrated literary technique...called cut-up." Its a bit like the magnets friends five you as a goofy extra birthday gift that have random words on them and you try to piece together sentences that are either intelligent or absurd and therefore funny. What I liked most about this idea (aside frmo having been forced to experiment with it throughout high school) was that "meaning could arise out of chaos" but it did not have to. The acceptance of something so ambiguous for the sake of a process of thinking outside the proverbially box is intriguing.