Above All, Do Not Talk

The Philosophical Implication Of Race-thinking Is That By Offering Us The Mystery Of Heredity As An Explanation, It Diverts Our Attention From The Social And Intellectual Factors That Make Up Personality.

To Watch A Football Game Is To Be In A Prolonged Neurotic Doubt As To What You're Seeing. It's More Like An Emergency Happening At A Distance Than A Game. I Don't Wonder The Spectators Take To Drink.

Seeing Clearly Within Himself And Always Able To Dodge Around The Ends Of Any Position, Including His Own, Shaw Assumed From The Start The Dual Role Of Prophet And Gadfly. To His Contemporaries It Appeared Frivolous And Contradictory To Perform As Both Superman And Socialist, Sceptic And Believer, Legalist And Heretic, High-brow And Mob-orator. But Feeling The Duty To Teach As Well As To Mirror Mankind, Shaw Did Not Accept Himself As A Contradictory Being.

Shaw Does Not Merely Decorate A Proposition, But Makes His Way From Point To Point Through New And Difficult Territory. This Explains Why Shaw Must Either Be Taken Whole Or Left Alone. He Must Be Disassembled And Put Together Again With Nothing Left Out, Under Pain Of Incomprehension; For His Politics, His Art, And His Religion - To Say Nothing Of The Shape Of His Sentences - Are Unique Expressions Of This Enormously Enlarged And Yet Concentrated Consciousness.

Maxims In Times Of Danger Are Useless, Experience Is Incommunicable. The Knotted Strands Of Life, Desire, Assumptions, And Moral Codes Cannot Be Unsnarled; They Can Only Be Cut, Which Is What Happens When An Air Raid Occurs, With A Silencing Fortissimo Like The Finale Of A Beethoven Symphony.