Stray Lines
Dear Reader,
Do you ever find that a line from a work just won’t leave you? Sometimes it’s literally the line; often it’s most of the line with a swapped in synonym or other infelicity that prevents it from being a verbatim quote. On rarest of occasions, the line is remembered in almost complete paraphrase—but whether this is truly a stray line or mere memory of an idea… well, that I haven’t puzzled out myself!
A line that’s been with me since high school is a delicious aphorism I was served up as a moral lesson:
‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave,/ When first we practise to deceive!’
Frankly, the lesson stuck, as that aphorism is great, so I guess the indoctrination worked on that count. The source of the quote, however, did not stick. I completely forgot that it was written by Sir Walter Scott. I, like many an individual to this day, mistook it for a quote from some bit of Shakespeare. It’s not one of Shakespeare’s. But it is accurate.
A favorite partial line that I can never recall verbatim—and is among the few that I’ve extracted into a small notebook of quotes and writings—comes from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Philosophy of Composition:
“The fact is that originality (unless in minds of very unusual force) is by no means a matter, as some suppose, of impulse or intuition. In general, to be found, it must be elaborately sought, and although a positive merit of the highest class, demands in its attainment less of invention than negation.”
Isn’t that perfectly fascinating? It’s also a great one to consider alongside ideas of intellectual property, like copyright law.
The thing about stray lines is we so often cannot recall their source, as I noted above with Sir Walter Scott’s quote. I wrote earlier this year about a stray image whose origin I couldn’t recall and was thrilled to rediscover, though I’d not have suffered too heavily if I’d never rediscovered its source: the image itself was the thing of value.
Even when we can remember a stray line in full, as I’ve long held Walter Lippmann’s gem on experts, it’s hard to note whether the line has been torn from its context or might have some more ambiguity to it than we first imagined.
(A fun thing about assembling my reading comprehension app was attempting to find self-contained quotes that didn’t mislead readers about the substance of the original piece. I can’t say I always succeeded, but I can say that a number of fascinating quotes were removed from consideration because of my parameters. I didn’t want stray lines that were misleading.)
And yet stray lines are some of the best fun in the reading life. The lines simply get worked into your veins: “The assumption that analysis and interpretation are always synonymous remains only an assumption.” Whew. (I wrote that from memory. Feel free to check me on it, Boothian scholars.) That line will never not make me smile, and it’s one that has stuck with me from my first reading.
I will note a small thing, though it’s a sidebar commentary. I think stray lines are a bit underappreciated in both their organic influence (as they rest on the periphery of conscious thought) and their value to the life of the mind.
It’s an underdeveloped musing, but I think a larger assembly of stray lines might be of at least equal worth to a mountainous assembly of read works which generate no lines that remain in the mind. There’s much underlining of stray phrases—I’ll do it myself when researching—but the systematic or intentional cordoning off of the best ones into a separate diary or quote compendium: this, I think, happens less. And for flickering reasons I can’t quite pin down, or perhaps should spend more time pinning down, I think this lack of deeper reflection on stray lines—even to the point where they dwell in our own heads—is a source of some intellectual lacking. Again, I don’t know precisely what that lack is (it’s not a glaring defect or anything), but I think there’s something there.
My sidebar aside, do you have any favorite stray lines, ones partially or fully remembered? Do you recall their source, or do they exist so on the periphery that you merely delight in their existence, origin long forgotten?
Aphorisms, like the one I opened with, tend to remain in the mind the easiest, but not all of my treasured stray lines are aphoristic in nature. How about yours?
To the stray lines,
Kreigh