Words from the Wise and Otherwise, Part Twelve
She said it, not me:
Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact—from calling on us to look through a heap of millet-seed in order to be sure that there is no pearl in it.
George Eliot. Impressions of Theophrastus Such. 1879.
Of course, I also call this blessing upon those who save us from their trivialities. We live in an oft-depressing heap of millet-seed, some of it of our own creation.
Enjoyably, she doubles down on that idea, turning it about with a great analogy:
THE TOO READY WRITER
One who talks too much, hindering the rest of the company from taking their turn, and apparently seeing no reason why they should not rather desire to know his opinion or experience in relation to all subjects, or at least to renounce the discussion of any topic where he can make no figure, has never been praised for this industrious monopoly of work which others would willingly have shared in. However various and brilliant his talk may be, we suspect him of impoverishing us by excluding the contributions of other minds, which attract our curiosity the more because he has shut them up in silence. Besides, we get tired of a "manner" in conversation as in painting, when one theme after another is treated with the same lines and touches. I begin with a liking for an estimable master, but by the time he has stretched his interpretation of the world unbrokenly along a palatial gallery, I have had what the cautious Scotch mind would call "enough" of him. There is monotony and narrowness already to spare in my own identity; what comes to me from without should be larger and more impartial than the judgment of any single interpreter. On this ground even a modest person, without power or will to shine in the conversation, may easily find the predominating talker a nuisance, while those who are full of matter on special topics are continually detecting miserably thin places in the web of that information which he will not desist from imparting. Nobody that I know of ever proposed a testimonial to a man for thus volunteering the whole expense of the conversation.
Why is there a different standard of judgment with regard to a writer who plays much the same part in literature as the excessive talker plays in what is traditionally called conversation?
George Eliot. Impressions of Theophrastus Such. 1879.
Well then.
Today in literary ecstasy:
I had read “King Lear” many times, but once I read it, and suddenly it took hold of me in a new way, and carried me along breathless, overwhelmed, to the end, I had read the “Antigone” over and over, but once when I came to it, it swept me up into its own clear air: I saw it steadily and saw it whole. Experiences like these, incommunicable as they are, are to be above all desired, above all prized. When one has had them it is hard to see how one could for long be content with less.
Elisabeth Morris. “The cult of the second-best.” 1917.
Indeed indeed.