Now, supposedly, if I start out a hundred meters ahead of Achilles, and Achilles is travelling five times faster than me, when he has covered that hundred meters, I will nevertheless have travelled twenty. And when he travels twenty, I will have travelled four. And when he travels that four, I will have traveled .8 meters, and so on and so forth, such that Achilles will never reach me. I win.

But Zeno, the cur, says that, eventually, Achilles overlaps me. "We know it from experience," he tells us. God damn experience! I know that if Achilles is continually arriving at the place that I was at before, he will never reach the place I am at now, and no experience needs to tell me otherwise. Zeno can kiss my green, mossy ass. Experience be damned.

It's a paradox. Achilles must, according to Zeno, both overlap me and never overlap me. Zeno. Who am I that Zeno should concern himself with me? A mere tortoise? And what is my victory to him? So what if I beat Achilles? What will it matter to him? And what if I lose? But Zeno somehow makes it his business, and experience wins in the end.

Comments

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gabrielle over 13 years ago

I loved this.

alexandergreenb (joined over 13 years ago)

My favorite contemporary writer is Tao Lin.

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Story information

License

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0

tags

paradoxical

Prompt

Prompt (write a story including these elements)

hero Turtle
villain Zeno
goal Go the distance
Prompt suggested by Galen

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