| Imagine that you enter
a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have
long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated
discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and
tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the
discussion had already begun long before any of them got
there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for
you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a
while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of
the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers;
you answer him; another comes to your defense; another
aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment
or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the
quality of your ally's assistance. However, the
discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must
depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still
vigorously in progress.
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(Kenneth Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form) |
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