The Myth of the Chinese Written Character

We wanted to believe in a silent writing. We wanted to believe in a reading that evoked no sounds, only images, so that the text could never be simply read out loud. To recite any text you would first have to form its ideas in your mind. Only then would you choose the words of the spoken language to represent the thought, just as one might recount a memory, or describe a passing scene. The signs on the page could not determine the sounds in the air. Between the poem and the performance there would always be a picture. There would be no reading without imagination.

The function of art is not to get you thinking but to end your thoughtlessness. It is not to make you feel something but to assuage your callousness.

Institutions are the way we do things, immediately, without thinking.

Intuitions are the way we see things, immediately, without feeling.

Experience is what makes us think and feel, i.e., imagine.

Imagination is the means by which our intuitions and our institutions change.

Literature doesn't change you. It helps you live with who you have become.

Explication de Texte

No philosopher is as wise as their art implies, nor poet, as loving.

Ergriffsschrift

Poetry is a sort inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, spheres, and the like, but equations for the human emotions. (E.P.)

Frege taught us that language has "functions":

Concept(object) = a true or false thought.

Likewise, perhaps

Emotion(subject) = a good or bad feeling?

Note that an object is a possible combination of things and a subject is the necessary isolation of a person. (Cf. Woolf on the loneliness that is the truth of things.)

Do not write a book because you hope it will be read.
Write a book because it must.

What they say about fascism is mostly true.
But what they say about democracy is not.

I am sometimes accused of expecting too much of my students, sometimes of not giving them enough credit, too often, of course, by the same people, in the same breath.