English talk is often very short, very much shorter than ours. This is because they all understand each other, are much closer kni...t than we are. Behind them are generations of "doing it" in the same established way, a way that their long experience of life has hammered out for their own convenience, and which they like. We're not nearly so closely knit together here, save in certain spots, especially the old spots. In Boston they understand each other with very few words said. So they do in Charleston. But these spots of condensed and hoarded understanding lie far apart, are never confluent, and also differ in their details; while the whole of England is confluent, and details have been slowly worked out through centuries of getting on together, and are accepted and observed exactly like the rules of the game.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say tha...t evolution is a natural process, history a human one.... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature--for instance in a biological survey of evolution--we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is one of those distinctions which is obvious, without being sharp or clear. It is obvious, and remains obvious, to every norma...l mind, although when we come to analyze it, we may not be able to rule a boundary line. It remains obvious, as the distinction between day and night remains obvious, though, when we begin to analyze that distinction, we come up against such refinements as dusk and twilight. There is more than one way of characterizing the difference. Perception is essentially a passive experience, something that happens to us; thinking is an active one, something that we do. Or if you don't like this distinction, because of refinements such as the "intentionality" which some have detected (rightly, I would say) in perception, or on the other hand because of the passivity of that uncontrolled type of thinking called "reverie," then thoughts are something that comes from within; perceptions something that comes from without.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It has only just begun to dawn on us that in our own language alone, not to speak of its many companions, the past history of huma...nity is spread out in an imperishable map, just as the history of the mineral earth lies embedded in the layers of its outer crust. But there is this difference between the record of the rocks and the secrets which are hidden in language: whereas the former can only give us knowledge of outward dead things--such as forgotten seas and the bodily shapes of prehistoric animals--language has preserved for us the inner living history of man's soul. It reveals the evolution of consciousness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he... aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perce...ption. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »