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

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I suspect they would be different for every person. That's why the shorthand is needed.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That would be why longhand should be used.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

It would be impossible to list all the things that anyone, or even one particular person, might try in order to achieve the goal. One probably can't even imagine all the things that another person might try.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Then you have no idea whether to emphasize that they're not necessary.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

We're going in circles here. You see that "only" as some kind of super-emphasis that I simply don't see. To me, "Only connect" has no emphasis at all on what one does not do. There's no point in our continuing this thread.