Clergy

"Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns."

"The operations of the human mind are also controlled by words of power, formulas that become a focus of mental activity."

"The objective world is the order of nature, thinking or reflection follows the suggestions of sense experience, and words are the servomechanisms of reflection."

"Those who do succeed in reading the Bible from beginning to end will discover that at least it has a beginning and an end, and some traces of a total structure."

"We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks."

"There's something in all of us that wants to drift toward a mob, where we can all say the same thing without having to think about it, because everybody is all alike except people that we can hate or persecute. Every time we use words, we're either righting against this tendency or giving in to it. When we fight against it, we're taking the side of genuine and permanent human civilization."

"The first thing that confronts us in studying verbal structures is that they are arranged sequentially, and have to be read or listened to in time."

"The particular myth that's been organizing this talk, and in a way the whole series, is the story of the Tower of Babel in the Bible. The civilization we live in at present is a gigantic technological structure, a skyscraper almost high enough to reach the moon. It looks like a single world-wide effort, but it's really a deadlock of rivalries; it looks very impressive, except that it has no genuine human dignity. For all its wonderful machinery, we know it's really a crazy ramshackle building, and at any time may crash around our ears. What the myth tells us is that the Tower of Babel is a work of human imagination, that its main elements are words, and that what will make it collapse is a confusion of tongues. All had originally one language, the myth says. That language is not English or Russian or Chinese or any common ancestor, if there was one. It is the language of human nature, the language that makes both Shakespeare and Pushkin authentic poets, that gives a social vision to both Lincoln and Gandhi. It never speaks unless we take the time to listen in leisure, and it speaks only in a voice too quiet for panic to hear. And then all it has to tell us, when we look over the edge of our leaning tower, is that we are not getting any nearer [to] heaven, and that it is time to return to the earth."

"The use of cliché [is] the use of ready-made, prefabricated formulas designed to give those who are too lazy think the illusion of thinking...If our aim is only to say what gets by in society, our reactions will become almost completely mechanical. That's the direction cliché takes us in...it's no more a product of a conscious mind than the bark of a dog."

"Jargon or gobbledygook, or what people who live in Washington or Ottawa call "federal prose," [is] the gabble of abstractions and vague words which avoids any simple or direct statement....Direct and simple language always has some force behind it, and the writers of gobbledygook don't want to be forceful; they want to be soothing and reassuring."

"The fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life...is to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in."

"There can be no free speech in a mob: free speech is one thing a mob can't stand."

"The fable says that the tortoise won in the end, which is consoling, but the hare shows a good deal of speed and few signs of tiring."

"When you stop to think about it, you soon realize that our imagination is what our whole social life is really based on....In practically everything we do it's the combination of emotion and intellect we call imagination that goes to work."

"Freedom has nothing to do with lack of training; it can only be the product of training. You're not free to move unless you've learned to walk, and not free to play the piano unless you practise. Nobody is capable of free speech unless he knows how to use the language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to be learned and worked at."

"In society's eyes the virtue of saying the right thing at the right time is more important that the virtue of telling the whole truth, or even of telling the truth at all."

"No matter what direction we start off in, the signposts of literature always keep pointing the same way, to a world where nothing is outside the imagination. If even time, the enemy of all living things, and to poets, the most hated and feared of all tyrants, can be broken down by the imagination, anything can be."

"The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination."

"No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us. Only the arts and sciences can do that, and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself."

"Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind."

"Nobody seriously thinks of television as a viewer's mode of perception...No matter how much he wants people to look at his product, the advertiser doesn't realize that television is [the viewer's] way of looking at him, & not his way of reaching them. (p. 95-6)"

"Education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him. It doesn't just train the mind: it's a social and moral development too."

"Finnegans Wake is not a book to read, but a book to decipher: as Joyce says, it's about a dreamer, but it's addressed to an ideal reader suffering from ideal insomnia."

"In literature you don't just read one poem or novel after another, but enter into a complete world of which every work of literature forms part. This affects the writer as much as it does the reader."

"The human mind is [a poet's] individual mind at first, but as soon as he writes a poem it becomes our [the readers'] minds too. There is no self-expression in [a poet's] poem, because once the poem is there the individual [poet] has disappeared. ...there is really no such thing as self-expression in literature."

"[L]iterature not only leads us toward the regaining of identity, but it also separates this state from its opposite, the world we don't like and want to get away from...We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it is still with us. ...Literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and deeper shadows."

"We relate the poems and plays and novels we read and see, not to the men who wrote them, nor even directly to ourselves; we relate them to each other. Literature is a world that we try to build up and enter at the same time."

"The poet...is an identifier: everything he sees in nature he identifies with human life."

"Norrie is not struggling for his place in the sun. He is the sun."

"Giving further impetus to literary study of the Bible was the work of several scholars of English and comparative literature, who extended their expertise in the analysis of literature to biblical texts. Most prominent were Northrop Frye ( The Great Code: The Bible and Literature), Robert Alter (The Art of Biblical Poetry), and Frank Kermode (The Genesis of Secrecy, a study of the Gospel of Mark)."

"Northrop Frye / Whatta guy / Reads more books than you or I"

"What was needed was a literary theory which, while preserving the formalist bent of New Criticism, its dogged attention to literature as aesthetic object rather than social practice, would make something a good deal more systematic and 'scientific' out of all this. The answer arrived in 1957, in the shape of the Canadian Northrop Fryes mighty 'totalization' of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism."

"One of the most obvious uses [of literature], I think, is its encouragement of tolerance. In the imagination our own beliefs are also only possibilities, but we can also see the possibilities in the beliefs of others. Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them as also possibilities."

"Even the biggest book is fragmentary: to finish anything, you have to cut your losses. Nobody ever writes his dream book. (33.54)"

"[What Poets Say:]"

"The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology. (21.101)"

"The total simultaneous pattern always extend from alpha to omega. (21.190)"

"I think that everybody tries to produce what Marshall McLuhan called a ‘counter environment.’ That is, you set yourself in opposition to the kind of mass tendencies which the media set up. That’s what’s so important about the humanities in the uni­versity...There’s something of a personal dialogue between one human being and another. And the fact that this dialogue is being car­ried out in the teeth of all the mass emotion techniques of the electronic media is a very important side of the humanities."

"I have a notion that a prolonged period of solitude & fasting would produce hallucinations, & that these would be mandalas and such: they would be the essential forms in which "outer" perceptions are organized. (18.23)"

"Give me a place to stand, and I will include the world. (19.333)"

"One should have bigger & better conversions everyday, like a mechanized phoenix. (21.495)"

"I'm a Blakean, a visionary disciple...But I'm always torn between feeling that the cock crows because he has a vision of the dawn, or because he feels stimulated by standing on top of a pile horseshit. (1942, entry #24)"

"A literary critic of experience never defines anything. (p. 4)"

"We read (experience) a text linearly, forgetting most of it while we read; then we study it as a simultaneous unit. (p. 325)"

"[Students] have to learn that ideas do not exist until they have been incorporated into words. Until that point you don’t know whether you are pregnant or just have gas on the stomach. (p. 746)"

"Belief has nothing to do with knowledge, & credo ut intelligam [I believe in order that I might understand] is horseshit. (p. 209)"

"In imaginative thought there is no real knowledge of anything but similarities (ultimately identities): knowledge of differences is merely a transition to a new knowledge of similarities. (p. 215)"

"Metaphor is the language of immanence; metonymy of transcendence. (11C.21)"

"You can never get rid of God as long as you continue to use words, because all words are part of the Word. (p. 871)"

"The "flow of information," which is mostly misinformation, is actually a presentation of myths. And people are increasingly rejecting the prescribed myths & developing their own counter-myths. (p. 97)"