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

[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.