disconnected

[calimac]

Well, it's happened again: something that's been puzzling me intermittently for decades, whenever it comes up.

Somebody uses the phrase "Only connect," in some context suggesting that they take it as a deeply meaningful personal motto. In this case it occupied an LJ userpic.

And I ask, "What does that actually mean?" By itself it's meaningless (connect what to what? and what else besides connect are you not supposed to do?), and context has never enabled me to make sense of it.

And I get one of two replies. Either I'm referred to the original source of the phrase in E.M. Forster's Howards End, or else to an essay by P.L. Travers that focuses on the phrase.

Here's the Forster paragraph.

"It did not seem so difficult. She need trouble him with no gift of her own. She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die."

Now, I do not consider myself a particularly stupid person. But I cannot make much sense out of that paragraph. If the thrust is, "Put passion in your prose," then "Only connect" seems a very peculiar and unexpressive way of putting it; nor does that seem to be the thrust of Travers' equally uncommunicative essay, whose theme seems to be an inchoate series of ideas weakly summarizable as "find meaning in life." Well, duh.

I'm missing something somewhere. Tell me in your own words, not Forster's or Travers's: what do you mean by it?

Comments

[barondave.livejournal.com]

I agree that "only connect" doesn't make any sense without context. In context, I think it's a worthy aspiration. Sort of like John Lennon's observation, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans," or Soren Kierkegaard saying, "Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it."

Life (he says, waving his hands expansively) is a journey. What you take from the journey encompasses its entirety.

Still, I wouldn't use "only connect" to ennoble the strands in your skein of life. I generally phrase a similar concept a bit more cynically: Everything is related to everything else. Some things more peripherally than others.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

But ... the Lennon and Kierkegaard aphorisms make sense.

[spacecrab.livejournal.com]

"Only connect" = "All you have to do is connect."

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Which still leaves the question, what do you then not have to do?

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

You then do not have to live as a fragmented human being (see my comment below).

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

No, the "only" implies, what else do you not have to do in order to avoid living as a fragmented human being?

[(Anonymous)]

My dictionary gives, as the first definition of "only" when used as an adverb: "in one manner or for one purpose alone; simply; merely; barely".

Simply connect?

-MTD / NEB

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

What does it matter what you DON'T have to do, if you know what you DO have to do?

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

What it means to me is that the two exist, but work must be done to bring them together, so that one will complement the other.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The two whats exist?

Furthermore we haven't even begun to plumb the depths of cryptic ambiguity in that paragraph. What are the beast and the monk, for instance? The id and the superego? If so, is the prose not prose in the sense of writing, but the prosaic part of life? And if that's the case, then how exactly is one expected to connect that with passion? Are you supposed to, like, just do it? Pretty worthless advice, if you remember that the person she's addressing these thoughts to is terminally staid. You don't get staid people to loosen up by just entreating them to loosen up.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I say nothing to the worth of the advice, only what I see as the sense of it. The two are prose and passion: the advice is to learn how to make them complement the other, or put passion in the prose, and articulate the passion in prose. Like the beast helps the monk, and the monk needs the beast. Kind of a weird graph, but it did make sense to me.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I still have no idea who or what the monk and the beast are, then. This is hopeless.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Metaphor pulled from where the flying monkeys appear? Like I say, I don't think it's a very good paragraph, but I think I know what it's saying.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I think the beast and the monk are our physical/bodily and mental/spiritual selves. "Prose" is, yes, the everyday, the plain and straightforward, the serving of "needs," if you will. "Passion" is the pursuit of "wants."

[scribblerworks.livejournal.com]

I sort of have to agree with you that "Only connect" doesn't really cover much. As you say, "Connect what?"

Does it mean "Don't live in isolation"?

Does it mean "You can't compartmentalize your life"? (That's a lesson I have learned -- the emotions you feel from one part of your life, do affect you in other parts of your life -- especially if they are negative emotions.)

I suspect that it's one of those phrases that hit hard with a "Wow! That's brilliant and concise!" when one is in the middle of reading the story, but which seem.... (heh) disconnected when out of context.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Does a preceding Forster paragraph help?

"Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the gray, sober against the fire."

It seems to me that in the context of the whole of Howards End, it refers to connections both within the individual and between individuals. Within the individual, I think that "Live in fragments no longer" is on point.

Before she went off the deep end, Anne Rice wrote, in Interview with the Vampire, of "persons in whom emotion and will" are one. To me, that refers to somewhat the same thing: a completely integrated human being.

However, I think that many (most?) people use the phrase more to refer to inter-personal, rather than intra-personal, connections.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Yes, that does make it clearer. It also makes the whole thing more watery pish. It further raises the question: since this is where all the unclear metaphors (prose/passion, monk/beast) in the succeeding paragraph are introduced and made clear, what makes anybody think that quoting the later paragraph by itself is going to convey anything?

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Because the quoter presumes that others already know the context? See my comment above.

Also, when something is used as, for example, an epigraph, it isn't always--in my experience, with scholarly books as well as more popular works--meant to convey something to the reader--at least not at the point where it appears. Sometimes it's meant to set a tone, or it is explained when one reads the entire work, or (I suspect) the author just likes it.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I'm making two separate criticisms of two separate usages, here.

1) My criticism of it for making no sense without context is not so much for its use as an epigram, but for its use as an explanation of what "only connect" means.

2) My criticism of it as an epigram is not merely for its making no sense without context - though the best epigrams do make sense by themselves - but also because, as sartorias says, it's not a very good paragraph.

Further, the example I linked to was not some random occasional use of it in some obscure chapter heading, but somebody holding it up as the whole thesis of their blog (which, you'll notice, they named for it). And I've seen it quoted before, in similar high esteem.

A random occasional quote would not be worth deconstructing in this manner. But here's this piece of gobbledegook that is being held up as some kind of gold standard of something.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Sometimes we (or some of us) read or hear words that speak to us without our having the ability to restate them in such a way that they speak to everyone, or to one specific other person (such as calimac). If we had the ability to express the idea in some other words, we probably would have already done so.

I mentioned the Anne Rice quotation, "persons in whom emotion and will are one." The first time I read that, more than 30 years ago, I thought, "Oh! Yes!" It has remained a touchstone for me ever since. When I have quoted it, however, sometimes people have asked me what it means. Well, if I had the words other than those to say what it means, I wouldn't have had such a moment of discovery when I first read it, and I wouldn't have held on to it ever since.

This, I think, is what some people get from poetry (I seldom do): the words say something that the reader/hearer instantly recognizes, but has never come up with the words for.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Why is it watery pish? Just because it doesn't speak to you? Obviously it speaks to some others.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Watery pish speaks to a lot of people. Rod McKuen was very popular in his day. So is ... I dunno, Deepak Chopra. Name your pish, people love it.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm finding I appreciate E.M. Forster's aphorism more, not less, as this discussion progresses. I encountered the phrase at least twenty years before reading Howards End, in Roger Ebert's review of David Lean's 1984 film adaptation of Forster's A Passage to India: Ebert noted that the characters largely fail to follow Forster's axiom, in that they don't connect to one another. And that is how I what I long took the phrase to mean: the most important thing one should do in life, or all one should do in life, or the first (or primary) thing one should to do in life ("Everybody knows something that is true to do--that is, something he ought to lose no time in setting about") is to connect to others. With my late twentieth-century upbringing, I might have phrased it, "Just connect".

If memory serves, the phrase does not appear in the Merchant-Ivory film of Howards End, so that remembering that this was the work to which Forster's dictum attached, I took it again as having a purely exterior meaning: the world would be a better place if the Wilcoxes, Schlegels and Basts, and by extension their classes and cultures, connected to one another. When I finally read the book two years ago, I was careless, remembering the film too much, and busily noting the differences between them, to consider the phrase as it appears in context. What registered most was how the book is more even-handed to the characters than the film is: kinder to the Wilcoxes and harsher to the Basts and Schlegels. Margaret in particular is a more complicated heroine in Forster's telling than in the film, for all that Emma Thompson managed to do with the role. And this I believed to be the prime reason that some critics (John Simon and David Shipman, for instance) had felt the film failed its source.

But now I see that the movie, for all its cinematic compensations, fails the novel in other ways, and though I've yet to read a critic who made this particular point (possibly excepting Stanley Kauffmann, whose review I shall reexamine -- but anyway, he liked the film), nonetheless I believe it informs their opinions: Ruth Prawer-Jhabvala's script has abandoned much of the novel's interior commentary. And while that is all but inevitable in any film adaptation of this sort of book --without resort to a narrator-- nonetheless it means that a lot of the novelist's ideas are lost. (Thus as one critic complained, the famous passage analyzing Beethoven's fifth symphony is practically a cartoon in the film.) This phrase and its full sense are among the casualties.

But I already can hear you asking again: that's all very well (or not), but what is that sense? Why did Forster himself so value this phrase that he used it as an epigraph for the entire work? Well, it is making a connection with different kinds of people. And it is connecting one's passionate and prosaic sides. And it is connecting actions to emotions. But I'm going to let someone else explain it: I found the following essay helpful (despite the error in its very title).

A reading of Howards End (http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:-Njf8LvbTbUJ:www.emforster.info/pages/howardsend.html+howards+end+only+connect&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

Some final notes: I caught a suggestion elsewhere in this discussion that if the reader can't easily make sense of "Only connect", there is no way that staid Henry will understand it. In fact, Margaret never utters the phrase, though Forster calls it her "sermon": she means to preach through example. And in the very next paragraph Forster says that she will fail: Henry doesn't notice things. Was Forster also fighting the long defeat? (Also, about that watery pish, I agree that sometimes Forster's ideas are better than his prose.)

-MTD / NEB

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I saw the film "A Passage to India" when it came out: I found it rather incoherent. Paging through discussions/explanations of the novel (I had no intention of trying to read the thing) did not help.

Reading Ebert's review now, I can sort of follow what he means by connecting, but absent what I have learned in this discussion, the phrase itself "only connect" still seems baffling, in a grammatical way. I wouldn't be able to parse how it means what it's supposed to mean.

But despite that critique of Forster's prose, my creeb about "watery pish" was a reference not to the prose, but to the ideas. Once I learned what "Only connect" is supposed to mean, the imperative of it seems to me to be casually and unprofoundly true, to be fundamentally trivial.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Interesting that you (and apparently those you refer to) take "Only connect" as meaning connect to others (as I said in my initial comment that it seems to me many people do), yet it seems clear to me that at least in the quotations from Howards End, the reference is to connecting the parts of oneself, becoming an integrated human being.