WhyWhy

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Why

If the world were only what it is, there would be no place for us. — Barrett Watten If we want to know what it felt like to be alive at any given moment in the long odyssey of the race, it is to poetry we must turn. — Stanley Kunitz Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. — Noam Chomsky Do I understand this sentence? Do I understand it just as I should if I heard it in the course of a narrative? If it were set down in isolation I should say, I don't know what it's about. But all the same I should know how this sentence might perhaps be used; I could myself invent a context for it. (A multitude of familiar paths lead off from these words in every direction.) — Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations § 525 There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking. By this I mean so simply that anybody knows it that composition is the difference which makes each and all of them then different from other generations and this is what makes everything different otherwise they are all alike and everybody knows it because everybody says it. — Gertrude Stein Composition As Explanation . . . of the spangled mind — Sappho Fragment 1

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