Gödel, Escher, Bach/Fridge

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Fridge Brilliance

  • A nonfiction example, here. I first read Godel Escher Bach about ten years ago. At the time, I'd thought that the cover was just a clever way of showing the book's initials (the subtitle is "an Eternal Golden Braid"). This morning, walking to work, it finally occurred to me that it's a visual metaphor for the book itself, that math (Gödel), art (Escher) and music (Bach) can act as shadows of the same difficult-to-express ideas. Since the book consists largely of presenting concepts (e.g., recursion) in the forms of math (recursive functions), art (Escher's "Drawing Hands") and music (certain fugues), the cover perfectly describes the contents. - grendelkhan