"Theater of cruelty" means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level of performance, it is not the ...cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other's bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Emerson was the greater artist. His essays contain some of the most beautiful language in our literature. How Henry James could ha...ve thought he had never developed a "style" is to me one of the mysteries of criticism. Thoreau in Walden comes close to the master, but he falls behind in the homeliness of his details and in the occasional smugness of his social satire. It almost seems as if he were reacting against the chiseled beauty of Emerson's prose. The latter's sentences were so fine that he needed nothing else. They became, like marble statues, part of the garden that was Concord. Their composer, serene, calm, detached, bland in speech and manner, the soft-spoken philosopher revered by all, did not often trouble himself on his strolls in the woods and along the river to pluck the flowers or feed squirrels or even identify the different species of flora and fauna. As Thoreau observed, he wouldn't have been willing to trundle a wheelbarrow through the streets of Concord because it would have seemed out of character. Emerson communed with nature on a spiritual level, using his eyes to take in the landscape and his lungs the fresh air. He had no needs to brace himself with cold or rain or spend the night under the stars.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hebraism contains no eternal realm of essence, which Greek philosophy was to fabricate, through Plato, as affording the intellectu...al deliverance from the evil of time. Such a realm of eternal essences is possible only for a detached intellect, one who, in Plato's phrase, becomes a "spectator of all time and all existence." This ideal of the philosopher as the highest human type--the theoretical intellect who from the vantage point of eternity can survey all time and existence--is altogether foreign to the Hebraic concept of the man of faith who is passionately committed to his own mortal being. Detachment was for the Hebrew an impermissible state of mind, a vice rather than a virtue; or rather it was something that Biblical man was not yet even able to conceive, since he had not reached the level of rational abstraction of the Greek. His existence was too earth-bound, too laden with oppressive images of mortality, to permit him to experience the philosopher's detachment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When the object is perceived as particular and unique and not merely the member of a family, when it appears independent of any ge...neral notion and detached from the sanity of a cause, isolated and inexplicable in the light of ignorance, then and only then may it be a source of enchantment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but resignation open- eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one of our feeling...s for which it is impossible to become a sham.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated among men of thought. Great havoc makes among our originalities. W...e have reached the mountain from which all these drift boulders were detached.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The most significant thing about writing is that it makes possible the detachment of affirmation from the speaker. Without writing..., all speech is context-bound: in such conditions, the only way in which an affirmation can be endowed with special solemnity is by ritual emphasis, by an unusual and deliberately solemnized context, by a prescribed rigidity of manner. But once writing is available, an affirmation can be detached from context. The fact that it is so detached in turn constitutes a very special context of a radically new kind. In a sense, the transcendent is born at that point, for meaning now lives without speaker or listener. It also makes possible solemnity without emphasis, and respect for content rather than for context.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The American suffrage movement has been, until very recently, altogether a parlor affair, absolutely detached from the economic ne...eds of the people.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
On the whole, "organic" illnesses of the body are viewed as a misfortune over which the victim has little control. Not so for "men...tal" illnesses. These diseases of the mind become diseases of the "self." We (our "selves") can distance ourselves from our "bodily" illnesses: "my leg is broken" or "my heart is failing." But, because of mind-body dualism, our mind is our self. "My mind is sick" is not differentiated psychologically from "I am sick." We cannot distance ourselves, take a detached view of our minds: we are our minds. When a disease affects brain function, the afflicted person and those around him feel that the "self" must be somehow in control of the disorder of "self."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Males more often operate in a detached and isolated fashion. Solitary work to master a skill is a common characteristic of male li...fe, and men are more quick to dismiss the claims of other people and even of their own emotions. This approach tends to make things (machines, ideas) at least as important as people in the man's inner life. Words such as rational, independent, and objective describe positive aspects of this tendency; cold, detached, unfeeling are words for the more destructive aspects. In contrast, women's lives are more likely to embody the theme of connection--both connection between people and connection between the emotional and intellectual parts of oneself. Women have less of a penchant for deciding things independent of the relevant network of connections. In most instances people matter more to them than things and they will put a faithfulness to human ties above dedication to "principle" or pure "independence" of judgment. It is testament to the male bias of our society that such qualities are often referred to with the demeaning names of "dependence" or "conformity."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »