Mr Blottisham was standing by the window.
“I've been thinking about Adam.”
Professor Quillibrace looked up.
“I'm sorry to hear it.”
“I mean the significance of his appearance.”
Miss Stray smiled.
“This could be promising.”
Blottisham ignored them.
“God creates everything else first. Then humanity appears.”
“Yes,” said Quillibrace.
“So humanity is part of the creation.”
“Obviously.”
“But not just another part.”
Quillibrace nodded.
“Why not?”
“Because humanity can talk about the rest of it.”
“And?”
“And talk about itself.”
There was a brief silence.
Miss Stray said, “That is rather important.”
Blottisham looked pleased.
“I thought so.”
Quillibrace put down his paper.
“The language-user has become something language can construe.”
Blottisham frowned.
“That sounds less impressive when you say it.”
“It is more precise.”
“So we are creatures who can construe ourselves as creatures.”
“Yes.”
Blottisham smiled.
“That's rather clever.”
“It is also unavoidable.”
“Why?”
“Because you have just done it.”
Blottisham stopped smiling.
Miss Stray laughed.
Quillibrace continued.
“We don't step outside language to discover what we are. We construe ourselves through the same resources with which we construe everything else.”
“So when we say ‘humanity’—”
“We have already made ourselves meaningful.”
“And Adam?”
“A meaning within the world the myth has constructed.”
Blottisham looked at Genesis.
“So the story contains the people who tell the story.”
“Eventually.”
“That seems rather recursive.”
“It is.”
Miss Stray leaned forward.
“And there is another recursion.”
Blottisham waited.
“Each person enters a world of meanings that existed before them.”
“Words, stories, categories, values.”
“Yes.”
“But then they can make new meanings.”
Quillibrace nodded.
“The individual inherits the semantic world and extends it.”
Blottisham looked thoughtful.
“So the collective creates the individual…”
“And the individual can contribute to the collective.”
Blottisham turned towards Quillibrace.
“That sounds almost like a theology of society.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it is a description of meaning-making.”
“Which sounds rather like theology when you say it.”
Miss Stray smiled.
“Perhaps theology and semiotics occasionally find themselves sitting in the same chair.”
Blottisham glanced at the chair.
“I hope they aren't both sitting there now.”
Quillibrace returned to his newspaper.
“They have been for several thousand years.”
Blottisham looked at Adam again.
“So humanity is not merely the author of the myth.”
“No.”
“It is also a meaning inside the myth.”
“Yes.”
He was silent for a moment.
“That's annoyingly elegant.”
Quillibrace looked up.
“Thank you.”
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