Thu
10th
10th
Dec
2009
2009
To be at all critically, or as we have been fond of calling it, analytically, minded—over and beyond an inherent love of the general many-colored picture of things—is to be subject to the superstition that objects and places, coherently grouped, disposed for human use and addressed to it, must have a sense of their own, a mystic meaning proper to themselves to give out: to give out, that is, to participate at once so interested and so detached as to be moved to a report of the matter.
— Henry James, The American Scene, taken from The Home Place by Wright Morris
