Knowing and knowing how (Riggs)
Just because they knew it was lost didn't mean they knew how to let it go.
Ransom Riggs, Hollow City
Labels: quote
Most people say that the purpose of poetry is communication: that sounds as if one could be contented simply by telling somebody whatever it is one has noticed, felt or perceived. I feel it is a kind of permanent communication better called preservation, since one’s deepest impulse in writing (or, I must admit, painting or composing) is to my mind not 'I must tell everybody about that' (i.e. responsibility to other people) but 'I must stop that from being forgotten if I can' (i.e. responsibility towards subject). . . . Of course, the process of preservation does imply communication, since that is the only way an experience can be preserved, and that explains why obscurity is so often a disadvantage; the distinction between communication and preservation is one of motive, and I think the latter word gives a very proper emphasis to the language-as-preserver rather than language-as-means-of-communication. In other words it makes it sound harder, which it is!
—Philip Larkin
—Philip Larkin
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
