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.

[spacecrab.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[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.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

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

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

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

[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]

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.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

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

[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."

[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.

[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?

[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?

[(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

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That doesn't help. Simply, as opposed to what that would be complex?

Look, if someone is trying to sell you a microwave dinner, and the ad says "simply put it in the microwave for five minutes," and you ask, "As opposed to what?", the answer is not, "As opposed to going hungry," but "As opposed to cooking from scratch: buying a lot of separate ingredients, and cutting them up and expending all the elbow grease of cooking, and cleaning up afterwards, yadda yadda."

The context seems to be Margaret telling Henry that being an integrated man is not a difficult thing to do: all he needs to do is "connect". So what are the other steps to integration that she's assuring him are not necessary?

The reason I'm making such a big deal out of this is that the favored quote has only two words, and one of those two words is "only". So it must be a pretty important part. I'm trying to figure out what it's there for.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

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

[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.")

[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.

[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]

It wouldn't, if the emphasis were not so clearly on the fact that you don't have to do it. The quote is "Only connect." That's two words. One of them is "only." This strongly suggests that the fact that there's something else you don't have to do is REALLY IMPORTANT. Otherwise she could just say "connect," without the "only."

[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.