especial good cause without the furtherance of which we never should
have done at all; but they were by that very fact specialised and
stiffened, committed to their one attitude, the immediately profitable,
and incapable of that play of gesture in which we recognise
representation. A representative, a rounded figure, however, is as to
none of its relations definable or announceable beforehand; we only know
it, for good or for ill, but with something of the throb of elation
always, when we see it, and then it in general sufficiently accounts for
itself. We often for that matter insist on its being a figure, we
positively make it one, in proportion as we seem to need it--or as in
other words we too acutely miss the active virtue of representation. It
takes some extraordinary set of circumstances or time of life, I think,
either to beguile or to hustle us into indifference to some larger felt
extension roundabout us of "the world"--a sphere the confines of which
move on even as we ourselves move and which is always there, just
beyond us, to twit us with the more it should have to show if we were a
little more "of" it. Sufficiency shuts us in but till the man of the
world--never prefigured, as I say, only welcomed on the spot--appears;
when we see at once how much we have wanted him. When we fail of that
acknowledgment, that sense as of a tension, an anxiety or an indigence
relieved, it is of course but that the extraordinary set of
circumstances, or above all the extraordinary time of life I speak of,
has indeed intervened.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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