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Elaine Scarry

26 quotes

“Beauty brings copies of itself into being. (p. 3)”
Elaine Scarry (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To misstate, or even merely understate, the relation of the universities to beauty is one kind of error that can be made. A university is among the precious things that can be destroyed. (p. 8)”
Elaine Scarry (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things. (p. 15)”
Elaine Scarry (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Something beautiful fills the mind yet invites the search for something beyond itself, something larger or something of the same scale with which it needs to be brought into relation. (p 21)”
Elaine Scarry (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The material world constrain us, often with great beneficence, to see each person and thing in its time and place, its historical context. But mental life doesn't so constrain us. It is porous, open to air and light, swings forward while swaying back, scatters its stripes in all directions, and delights to find itself beached beside something invented only that morning or instead standing beside an altar from three millennia ago. (p 34)”
Elaine Scarry (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When we come upon beautiful things...they act like small tears in the surface of the world that pull us through to some vaster space. (p 77)”
Elaine Scarry (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Physical pain has no voice, but when it at last finds a voice, it begins to tell a story. (Introduction, p3)”
Elaine Scarry (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language…Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it. (Introduction, p4)”
Elaine Scarry (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is the intense pain that destroys a person's self and world, a destruction experienced spatially as either the contraction of the universe down to the immediate vicinity of the body or as the body swelling to fill the entire universe. (Chapter 1, p35)”
Elaine Scarry (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“we are most backward on behalf of the things we believe in most in part because, like ancients hesitant to permit analogies to God, our instincts salute the incommensurability of pain by preventing its entry into worldly discourse. The result of this is that the very moral intuitions that might act on behalf of the claims of sentience remain almost as interior and inarticulate as sentience itself. (Chapter 2)”
Elaine Scarry (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“war, like torture, is...a structure through which the attributes of the hurt body are connected to unanchored verbal constructs: what within torture happens between two people-the body of a prisoner deprived of his voice, and the verbal constructs of the interrogating torturer, himself disembodied through his immunity to pain-is a phenomenon of transfer in war happening on a now vast scale, between the collective casualties and collective national constructs. The two are structural analogues. Like torture, war claims pain's attributes as its own and disclaims the pain itself. (Chapter 2)”
Elaine Scarry (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is impossible to speak of either torture or war without attending to the destruction of the artifacts of civilization in either their interior and mental or exterior and materialized forms; even more significantly, the infliction of pain in torture is inextricably bound up with the generation of a political "fiction" just as the injuries of war are bound up with a process of conferring facticity on unanchored cultural "constructs." (Chapter 3)”
Elaine Scarry (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Like the coatmaker, the poet is working not to make the artifact (which is just the midpoint in the total action), but to remake human sentience; by means of the poem, he or she enters into and in some way alters the alive percipience of other persons...In the attempt to understand making, attention cannot stop at the object (the coat, the poem), for the object is only a fulcrum or lever across which the force of creation moves back onto the human site and remakes the makers. (Chapter 5)”
Elaine Scarry (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“the populace’s wellbeing—the safety of the people—is the only reason for having a government; but our government has gotten very separated from the wellbeing of the people, and from the requirement for enlisting people into the defense of the country.”
Elaine Scarry (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“the result of prior preparation for emergency is that it allows some space in your mind for thinking. You’re not trying to invent everything on the spot; you may have to invent one thing on the spot, but nine of the ten things you have to do you’ve already rehearsed mentally. And so yes, I think you’re exactly right, that calmness is something that would accompany a society that has practiced.”
Elaine Scarry (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Pain is not a verbal construct. When something like suffering becomes almost impossible to put into language, it’s a disaster.”
Elaine Scarry (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The structure of one’s position with regards to the suffering of others shapes one’s perceptions and thinking almost completely.”
Elaine Scarry (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“…In the context of my work on consent and nuclear war, I had given hundreds of lectures, and someone would always say, “Yes, but these constitutional rules, and the social contract, et cetera, can’t be incorporated into this fast world of nuclear weapons,” and so on. I would always say, “Do we throw out the constitution and social contract? Or do we throw out the things that go too fast?” But I always just accepted that that was a problem. This argument about speed, though, has turned out to be a complete fabrication.”
Elaine Scarry (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nowhere is the sadistic potential of a language built on agency so visible as in torture. While torture contains language, specific human words and sounds, it is itself a language, an objectification, an acting out. Real pain, agonizing pain, is inflicted on a person; but torture, which contains specific acts of inflicting pain, is also itself a demonstration and magnification of the felt-experience of pain. In the very processes it uses to produce pain within the body of the prisoner, it bestows visibility on the structure and enormity of what is usually private and incommunicable, contained within the boundaries of the sufferer's body. It then goes on to deny, to falsify, the reality of the very thing it has itself objectified by a perceptual shift which converts the vision of suffering into the wholly illusory but, to the torturers and the regime they represent, wholly convincing spectacle of power. The physical pain is so incontestably real that it seems to confer its quality of "incontestable reality" on that power that has brought it into being. It is, of course, precisely because the reality of that power is so highly contestable, the regime so unstable, that torture is being used. (beginning of Chapter 1, "The Structure of Torture: The Conversion of Real Pain into the Fiction of Power")”
Elaine Scarry (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Hebrew Scriptures, along with the Christian scriptures they gave rise to, are among all the singular artifacts of western civilization perhaps the single most monumental, for they can be credited with sponsoring a civilization to a degree shared by no other isolated verbal text (Hamlet, War and Peace, the United States Constitution) or by any isolated material object (the pyramids, the Panama Canal, the Brooklyn Bridge). Although, however, they are themselves a monumental artifact, they are at the same time a monumental description of the nature of artifice. Product of the human imagination, they are also a tireless laying bare of the workings of the imagination, not merely the record of its aspirations toward disembodiment or of its origins in pain but, more concretely, the record of the very sequence of stages and substitutions by which it regulates and promotes its own acts of self-modification...the scriptures can be understood as narratives about created objects that enable the major created object, namely God, to describe the interior structure of all making. (beginning of Chapter 4, "The Structure of Belief and Its Modulation Into Material Making: Body and Voice in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures and the Writings of Marx")”
Elaine Scarry (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When one suddenly finds oneself in the midst of a complicated political situation, it is hard not only to assess the "rightness" and "wrongness" of what is taking place but even to perform the much more elementary task of identifying, descriptively, what it is that is taking place. The fact that torture, whose activity has a structure accurately summarized by the word "stupidity, should ever even for a moment successfully present itself to the outside world as an activity of "intelligence-gathering" is not an aimless piece of irony but an indication of the angle of error (in this case, 180°) that may separate a description of an event from the event itself. (beginning of Chapter 5, "The Interior Structure of the Artifact")”
Elaine Scarry (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“the nature of creation, however self-effacing, must also be conceptually available and susceptible to description so that the periodic dislocations within its overall structure of action can be recognized and repaired. The collective effort to understand making, already very old, will always be ongoing. Like the work of making, it keeps itself going: "The craftsman encourages the goldsmith,/ and he who smooths with the hammer / him who strikes the anvil" (Isaiah 41:7). Directed against the isolating aversiveness of pain, mental and material culture assumes the sharability of sentience. It holds within itself the universal salutation of Amnesty's whispered "Corragio!" It passes on the password of Isaiah's ancient artisans-"Take Courage!" (41:6). (chapter 5, p325-6)”
Elaine Scarry (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I talk about pain and creation, I really do mean in the most literal way possible that they are opposites and opposites that are, as you say, jarring in their relationship. When I started writing the book, I actually had begun by thinking that if I wanted to write about pain, I should not begin to talk about creation. As a student and young teacher of literature, I knew that often in literary realms we refer to the fact that out of suffering comes creation, and I had originally felt resistance to that idea just because the relentless nature of cancer pain, or burn pain, or pain inflicted in political contexts, never has any room in it for creation and, therefore, to imagine that great acts of creativity could come about seemed to excuse and apologize for the existence of suffering in the world. So my original intention was to write only about pain and not to stray into creation. And, then, as I began to work on the question of torture—and I can almost remember the moment in which this happened, as I sat there reading piles and piles of Amnesty International materials—I suddenly saw that the structure of cruelty that I was observing was actually a kind of standing of creation on its head. Not only were suffering and creation not in league with one another; they were radical opposites. (2000)”
Elaine Scarry (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the things that has seduced people into giving up on their own actions is the claim of emergency—the government will often make the spurious claim that because certain things require very fast action, there is no time for ordinary processes of deliberation and thinking, and therefore we have to abridge our normal protocols. I find exactly the opposite to be the case. Thinking and emergency action are deeply compatible. Sometimes that thinking takes the form of very recognizable deliberative processes, and many other times that thinking takes a form that may be less easy to recognize—protocols, procedures, laws that we deliberate about in advance, and we build all the deliberation into the protocols, and then that allows us to act very quickly.”
Elaine Scarry (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“we sometimes refer to a 9/11 moment as though that feeling of camaraderie is unusual, but actually that feeling of camaraderie would be the norm if, for example, we followed the Constitutional rules about war-making. We’ve allowed the Executive to do everything. If we restore to the population both the responsibility and the obligation to oversee our entry into war, then there would be this sense of esprit and responsibility, and we would have the power to put a brake on war. It might also be that the population would agree to go to war, if there were really strong arguments, but the way it is now, the whole war-making machinery is decoupled from the larger population, making its consent or dissent irrelevant. There’s a reason why we’ve allowed the population to be excluded from the military, and that is because joining the military and ever having to go to war are so aversive and so much against the grain of civilized behavior.”
Elaine Scarry (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“people who oppose torture (until the period we’re in now) are absolute about it: there are international prohibitions; there’s extraterritorial jurisdiction in US law ... It’s very unusual and absolute, whereas if you look at all the antiwar literature, there’s nothing like that kind of absoluteness. Even those passionately opposed to war always have provisions allowing countries to go to war if they’ve tried everything else. I realized that the reason for that is that in torture there’s zero consent, whereas in war there’s a great deal of consent. I then realized, however, that in nuclear war this was untrue. Nuclear war much more closely approaches the model of torture than the model of war.”
Elaine Scarry (born 1946) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source