Epanodos (e-pan’-o-dos): 1. Repeating the main terms of an argument in the course of presenting it. 2. Returning to the main theme after a digression. 3. Returning to and providing additional detail for items mentioned previously (often using parallelism).
The quotation below is excerpted from Professor Blitzthart’s celebrated tome: The Fifth Amendment in Everyday Life:
What do you do when your couch is burning? This is a question most of us will never ask, let alone, know the answer to. But, a question unasked goes unanswered, and an answered question can lead to new questions, more vexing, more troubling than the answer.
That is, we should ask more questions that go unanswered. Why? Not only do they contract our anxiety by clearing future scenarios that clog our walk through life, but they teach us not to waste our wonder on what we do not know, but even more perilous, on what we know we do not know.
So, what would you do when your couch is burning? There are countless remedies—dump water on it, drag it outdoors, put a blanket over it, etc. But why consider these remedies, or any others for that matter, when your couch will never catch fire. Even if it happens, your smoke alarms will go off and you’ll safely exit your house, and you’ll watch it burn down from the street.
So, we have discovered that asking even far-fetched questions will induce us to attempt to formulate an answer, right? So, we can see asking, almost necessarily, leads to answering, or at least two or three seconds of fruitless wondering.
You may ask, what’s the point of what I have written here? Surely it is an attempt to answer a question. But really, I have resisted the temptation to do so, perhaps frustrating the reader, while at the same time liberating myself from burdensome expectations driven by the question/answer sequence—a social construct even more pernicious than the please/thank-you sequence that marks indebtedness to the “other” in an act of subservience and a token of dependence, weakness, and even fear.
We have come to the main point again. Socially sanctioned sequences set expectations which engender obedience, and rob us of our freedom and the fruitful exercise of wonder. In that spirit we must resist the pitfalls of answers, and subservient acts of thanksgiving. To questions, we must learn to say “I don’t know,” or “ I refuse to answer on the grounds that your question is stupid.” As far as the please/thank-you sequence goes, just say “Gimme,” and take what you get, and walk away triumphantly.
POSTSCRIPT
Professor Blizthart’s book, The Fifth Amendment in Everyday Life is a good read. If you are an Ayn Rand fan, it will bolster your faith in the social inferiority of sniveling socialists and commie insurgents who believe “all men are created equal” and have equal rights.
The book’s title is among the greatest ironies ever perpetrated in Western thought, ranking with Socrates’s alleged belief that beauty can edify the soul, when in fact. it is only skin deep.
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