Burke's Unending Conversation
Seem familiar anyone?
"Imagine that you enter a parlour. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress."
- Source 110-11, Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1941.
Comments
As the famous philospher, Mr Manfred Mann, once said:
And nothing ever happens, nothing happens at all
The needle returns to the start of the song
And we all sing along like before
And we'll all be lonely tonight and lonely tomorrow
although personally I feel more cheerful about it than that...
Posted by: Johnnie Moore | June 4, 2004 7:43 AM
Ha ha, exactly, and glad to hear it(!) on the cheeriness front. You're right to pick up on Mann, though. Very much one of the more overlooked thinkers of the modern era, and certainly influenced me more than I probably do wah diddy diddy dum realise.
Posted by: Piers Young | June 4, 2004 12:21 PM