{"id":4742,"date":"2015-08-10T17:19:13","date_gmt":"2015-08-10T17:19:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelwagstaff.com\/?p=4742"},"modified":"2016-11-01T16:08:14","modified_gmt":"2016-11-01T16:08:14","slug":"three-versions-of-an-objectivist-poetics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelwagstaff.info\/wordpress\/three-versions-of-an-objectivist-poetics\/","title":{"rendered":"Three versions of an Objectivist Poetics"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Grandmother, have you ever looked a donkey in the eyes?”<\/p>\n

“I may have done, my dear boy, I don’t remember.”<\/p>\n

“In that case you haven’t, because otherwise you’d certainly remember. Grandmother, if donkeys could speak …”<\/p>\n

“Believe me, my dear boy, they wouldn’t and couldn’t say anything superhuman. They’d ask for good straw and clean water.”<\/p>\n

“Well, that may be. Even if they didn’t go beyond those two or three words, at least they’d be referring to concrete, visible, tangible things. What an immense benefit it would be to our old, baroque civilization if we could only start all over again from the beginning, from bare straw and clean water, and grope our way forward there, subjecting the big words in current use to severe scrutiny one by one.”<\/p>\n

— a conversation between the characters Pietro Spina and Maria Vicenza Spina in Ignazio Silone’s\u00a0The Seed Beneath the Snow\u00a0<\/em>(1942).<\/p>\n