Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist--the only thing he's good for--is to take these handfuls of... confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning. Even if it's only his view of a meaning. That's what he's for--to give his view of life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The strategy of semantic ascent is that it carries the discussion into a domain where both parties are better agreed on the object...s (viz., words) and on the main terms connecting them. Words, or their inscriptions, unlike points, miles, classes and the rest, are tangible objects of the size so popular in the marketplace, where men of unlike conceptual schemes communicate at their best. The strategy is one of ascending to a common part of two fundamentally disparate conceptual schemes, the better to discuss the disparate foundations. No wonder it helps in philosophy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As if, as if, as if the disparate halves Of things were waiting in a betrothal known... To none, awaiting espousal to the sound Of right joining, a music of ideas, the burning And breeding and bearing birth of harmony, The final relation, the marriage of the rest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This is the man who classified the bits Of his friends' hells into a pigeonhole--... He hung each disparate anguish on the spits Parboiled and roasted in his own withering soul.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »