The purpose of ritual for men is to learn the rules of power and competition. Watching sports together, for example, they see the ...formal enactment of ritual, become loyal to a team, learn to conceal their vulnerability. The purpose of ritual for women (going to lunch together, sharing a favorite salon, etc.) is to learn how to make human connections. They are often more intimate and vulnerable with one another than they are with their men, and taking care of other women teaches them to take care of themselves. In these formal ways, men and women domesticate their emotional lives. But their strategies are different, their biological itineraries are different. His sperm needs to travel, her egg needs to settle down. It's astonishing that they survive happily at all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But always and sometimes questioning the old modes And the new wondering, the poem, growing up through the floor,... Standing tall in tubers, invading and smashing the ritual Parlor, demands to be met on its own terms now, Now that the preliminary negotiations are at last over.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To suppose that "I know" is a descriptive phrase, is only one example of the descriptive fallacy, so common in philosophy. Even if... some language is now purely descriptive, language was not in origin so, and much of it is still not so. utterance of obvious ritual phrases, in the appropriate circumstances, is not describing the action we are doing, but doing it ("I do"): in other cases it functions, like tone and expression, or again like punctuation and mood, as an intimation that we are employing language in a special way ("I warn," "I ask," "I define"). Such phrases cannot, strictly, be lies, though they can "imply" lies, as "I promise" implies that I fully intend, which may be true.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are alr...eady taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Compare ... the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the seas...on they re-enact the same drama. Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No doubt for the average man nationalism is no more than one of the faiths that live together in actual if illogical partnership i...n his heart and mind (illogical in the sense that some of these faiths, say Christianity and national patriotism, may have mutually incompatible ethical ideals). Yet it is hard to exaggerate the extent to which for many modern Western men the worship of the nation-state occupies a major part of their conscious relations with groups outside the family.... The ritual surrounding the flag, patriotic hymns, the reverent reading of patriotic texts, the glorification of national heroes (saints), the insistence on the nation's mission, the nation's basic consonance with the scheme of the universe--all of this is so familiar to most of us that unless we are internationalist crusaders in favor of a world-state or some other proposed means for securing universal peace we never even notice it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Miss America contest is ... the most perfectly rendered theater in our culture, for it so perfectly captures what we yearn for...: a low-class ritual, a polished restatement of vulgarity, that wants to open the door to high-class respectability by way of plain middle-class anxiety and ambition.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »