What They Said
night sky and rock bridge
I’ve been looking at quotations. Phrases and thoughts disconnected from their original settings and placed in isolation – or rather, a sea of isolation as they space with thousands and thousands of other fragments of related, but not connecting, phrases. How do they decide what goes in, I wonder.
Most sources quoted are, of course, from people in the West – from the ancient Greeks to modern US business owners or athletes. Primarily men. A few from Asia, with far less variety of sources – from casual perusal you’d think that only five or six Asians – Sun Tzu, Confucius and a few others – have said anything worth saving and savoring over the years.But those few said a lot, so you have your pick there. Even fewer Blacks or Latin@s are quotable, it would appear, especially about anything not dealing with slavery or civil rights issues.
I’m familiar with a lot of them. I used to have a Bartlett’s when I was younger, and I’d sit and read page by page, absorbing some, instantly forgetting others. In this way I learned the names of many thinkers (or people with a knack for words) but little, if anything, about the original text, or about the writers/speakers themselves. Of course, the quotations often stand on their own, the little snippets enough to encourage or motivate or inspire, but I sometimes think about how easy it is to change the meaning of a sentence just by removing portions of it and I wonder if what I think I know or learned bears any resemblance to what the author meant. And then I wonder if that even matters.
Probably not. I guess I decided that early as I rarely look past the few words given and seek out the sources. I am, I find, most often content to let the fragment before my eyes contain its wisdom or knowledge or pleasure, each a minuscule world in itself.
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
–Yeats
photo from here – via Our Luminous World
Nanette is | Topic: before midnight, questioning ramble | Tags: None
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