[Here is my response to today’s Finding Everyday Inspiration prompt https://dailypost.wordpress.com/blogging-university/writing-everyday-inspiration/ on the subject of quotations. Sorry it is a bit stroppy.]

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

–Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, stanza 51, lines 7-9.

I don’t generally do quotes or epigraphs. I am suspicious of them for the same reason that I am suspicious of sound-bites, tweets and the random citation of snippets of Holy Scripture as a quick (and cheap) way to make (and swiftly close) an argument.

On the one hand, I believe that anything truly worth expressing will always be so shot through with ambiguities, contradictions and possible counter-claims that a lengthy exposition is always necessary. Arguments, like fine wines, need time to develop, preferably in dialogue with other writers.

On the other hand, isolated quotations shorn of their historical and immediate intertextual context invariably distort the originally intended meaning and the most famous and oft-repeated of these are more often than not outright misquotations, the waters further muddied by frequent misattribution.

If you are going to quote someone, my advice is that:

a) you quote a whole text or substantial chunk of it (a whole poem for example, rather than an apparently clear-cut snippet of an otherwise ambivalent whole). The oft-quoted Ages of Man speech from Shakespeare’s As you Like It, for example, is frequently referenced without noting that, in the play, these words are put into the mouth of a jaded character, of whose views both the author and the other characters obviously disapprove;

b) you source your quotations scrupulously and provide a full reference. I recently wanted to entitle a blog post Damned Lies and Statistics. I therefore studiously checked out the origin of this quite common phrase and found that there is in fact no consensus among scholars as to who first said it or (more importantly) why. I chose therefore not to use the title and not even to finish writing the post.

The only exception that I make to this general self-imposed rule concerns the case of quotations that are in themselves deliciously (and preferably deliberately) ambiguous and paradoxical. The fragments of the Ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus constitute a rich source in this regard, although, even in this case, it is clear that the process of quotation and fragmentation of the thinker’s work over time may have seriously distorted his original (now irrecoverable) intent. The same is true to some extent of thinkers, such as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, who are deliberately aphoristic, although nowadays I tend to find more subterfuge than subtlety in this device. Nietzsche’s ‘philosophizing with a hammer,’ for all his erudition, is a little too Trump-like for my taste.

My favorite quotation is the famous one about self-contradiction from the 51^st stanza of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, with which ironically I began this post. It is of course a much more enriching, if a little more challenging, experience to read it in the context of the whole stanza, with which I end this post.

The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them.

And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?

Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,

(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

 Who has done his day’s work? who will soonest be through with his supper?

Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?