HNH 2009: lleHNHeaven

2009, 730 page hardcover book

9 x 6 x 2 inches

 

In the Year of the Ox, HNH delivers lleHNHeaven, a 730-page volume that considers the dialectical binary in the form of a tic-tac-toe game. Each page alternates the location of X's and O's with the center square left open.

 

In 1843, Søren Kierkegaard published Either/Or, a text in which the philosopher attempted to answer the question of how we should live. Ignoring subtlety and grayscale, we often define our world in narrowed polarities of win/lose, right/wrong, black/white, etc. More often then not, we de-value the opposite, dissenting opinion.

Stéphane Mallarmé, in his last great poem, lamented how "a roll of the dice will never abolish chance." As children, we pluck daisy petals to contemplate love. In Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men (2005), the antagonist flips a coin to signal the chanced fate of his victims. By answering any enquiry in similar fashion, the reader moves from passive observer to active participant by filling in the last square.

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lleHNHeaven ponders not only the question posed by Aristotle of “how should we live?” but also, with no less weight, of “how should we die?”

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