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

[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 it's a lot better paragraph in context.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

If it's not a very good paragraph, or works better in context, I wish people would stop quoting it out of context as if it were the gold standard of something.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Aren't there a lot of things that are quoted with no context because it's presumed that anyone who knows or cares what the quoter means already knows the context? "Fourscore and seven years ago" or "A day that will live in infamy" make no sense unless one already knows the context. Sometimes the context required in order for someone who is completely new to the quotation to understand it is too bulky for the situation. Sometimes quoters think their audience is likely already to be in the choir. (And there's a reference that makes no sense if one doesn't already know the expression "preaching to the choir.")

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Come on. The context here is just not that famous.

Furthermore, if somebody were at sea enough to have to ask, "What does 'Fourscore and seven years ago' actually mean?", I hope someone would reply "A score is 20, so that's a fancy way of saying '87 years ago', and since this was said in 1863, it's a reference to the U.S. Declaration of Independence of 1776," instead of simply dumping a chunk of the Gettysburg Address on them without any further explanation.

Which is what happened to me. I asked what "only connect" means, and instead of an explanation, I got the second paragraph of the two paragraph quote dumped on me, without the necessary first paragraph or anything else. And this has happened when I asked the question before, too.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

If the context is "just not that famous," why have you seen this so many times that it has caused this great irritation?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The two-word motto is used a lot, yes. But not THAT often. The context, however, hardly ever comes up except when I ask what the motto means.