Perception Quotes

27 quotes

In a world where education is predominantly verbal, highly educated people find it all but impossible to pay serious attention to anything but words and notions. There is always money for, there are always doctorates in, the learned foolery of research into what, for scholars, is the all-important problem: Who influenced whom to say what when? Even in this age of technology the verbal humanities are honored. The non-verbal humanities, the arts of being directly aware of the given facts of our existence, ale almost completely ignored. A catalogue, a bibliography, a definitive edition of a third-rate versier's ipsissima verba, a stupendous index to end all indexes — any genuinely Alexandrian project is sure of approval and financial support: But when it comes to finding out how you and I, our children and grandchildren, may become more perceptive, more intensely aware of inward and outward reality, more open to the Spirit, less apt, by psychological malpractices, to make ourselves physically ill, and more capable of controlling our own autonomic nervous system — when it comes to any form of non-verbal education more fundamental (and more likely to be of some practical use) than Swedish drill, no really respectable person in any really respectable university or church will do anything about it. Verbalists are suspicious of the non-verbal; rationalists fear the given, non-rational fact; intellectuals feel that "what we perceive by the eye (or in any other way) is foreign to us as such and need not impress us deeply." Besides, this matter of education in the non-verbal humanities will not fit into any of the established pigeonholes. It is not religion, not neurology, not gymnastics, not morality or civics, not even experimental psychology. This being so the subject is, for academic and ecclesiastical purposes, non-existent and may safely be ignored altogether or left, with a Patronizing smile, to those whom the Pharisees of verbal orthodoxy call cranks, quacks, charlatans and unqualified amateurs.

Unreliable narrator! Unreliable narrators are considered a device, right? Don't answer. They are. They are and they don't get a lot of literary analysis because it's a gimmick. It's a trick. I mean "Canterbury Tales" gets a shoutout because, you know, it's good but typically it's used for popcorn crime novels and thriller movies. Agatha Christie, "Usual Suspects", so on and so forth. But I'm going to argue that every narrator by its very definition is unreliable because when you tell a story there's always an essential distance between the story itself and the telling of said story, right? So therefore every story that has ever been told has an unreliable narrator. The only truly reliable narrator would be someone hypothetically telling a story that unfolds before our very eyes which is obviously very impossible. So what does that tell us? That the only truly reliable narrator is life itself. But life itself is also completely unreliable because it is constantly misdirecting and misleading us and taking us on this journey where it is literally impossible to predict where it is going to go next. Life as the ultimate unreliable narrator!