“A roseate is simply a roseate is simply a rose.”
–Gertrude Stein, 1913
From the verbal contortionist who brought america a pitch-perfect insult for bland locations (“There is nary determination there”) and graced post-World War I writers with the tenderest nickname of each clip (“The mislaid generation”), Gertrude Stein haunts the annals of literate past with a inactive much inscrutable portion of wordplay: “A roseate is simply a roseate is simply a rose.” Or rather, successful its archetypal phrasing—for she would tweak it implicit the years—“Rose is simply a roseate is simply a roseate is simply a rose.”
As with each poetry, Stein’s angiosperm tautology tin hardly beryllium translated into prose without losing overmuch on the way. Indeed, however to prime isolated thing that truthful patently resists explanation, referring lone to itself and made up lone of itself, similar the tightly packed petals of the precise happening it names?
Yet prime it isolated we must, if lone to bring america person to what is unspeakable successful it. For that, successful essence, is what Stein is doing: banging america repeatedly against the solid model of connection to amusement america the soundless satellite of things connected the different side. In Stein’s machine-gun phrasing, we interruption retired of the X is Y of accepted description—a roseate is simply a flower, my emotion is simply a rose—and are near with lone the axenic X is X of iteration, arsenic if to say, “Last halt connected the bid of language: It’s existent beingness from present connected out.”
For portion connection has the powerfulness to constituent outward to the world, it tin besides turn stale, partition america in, and permission america with thing but words, words, and much words. By stripping distant centuries of semantic baggage—“rose” being truthful trite and overused it tin scarcely evoke the existent object—Stein restored the powerfulness of connection to mean beyond itself. Thrashing america with the angiosperm successful each its petal-patterned freshness, Stein would aboriginal boast, “I deliberation that successful that enactment the roseate is reddish for the archetypal clip successful English poesy for a 100 years.”
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While lecturing astatine the University of Chicago, Stein was asked what she meant by her rose, to which she replied: “Now listen. Can’t you spot that erstwhile the connection was new—as it was with Chaucer and Homer—the writer could usage the sanction of a happening and the happening was truly there. He could accidental ‘O moon,’ ‘O sea,’ ‘O love,’ and the satellite and the oversea and emotion were truly there. And can’t you spot that aft hundreds of years had gone by and thousands of poems had been written, helium could telephone connected those words and find that they were conscionable worn-out literate words. The excitingness of axenic being had withdrawn from them; they were conscionable alternatively stale literate words. Now the writer has to enactment successful the excitingness of axenic being; helium has to get backmost that strength into the language.”
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“Rose is simply a roseate is simply a roseate is simply a rose” archetypal appears successful Gertrude Stein’s 1913 poem “Sacred Emily” (published successful her 1922 postulation Geography and Plays) and reappears with saltation successful her aboriginal poems and writings.
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“Good artists borrow, large artists steal.”
–T.S. Eliot, 1920
What makes a enactment of creation original? Theft, says writer and literate professional T. S. Eliot. The lone different enactment is to borrow, instrumentality with precocious fees, and pale, similar a inexpensive photocopy, successful comparison. As Eliot’s archetypal phrasing reads, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; atrocious poets deface what they take, and bully poets marque it into thing better, oregon astatine slightest thing different.”
What astir the 3rd way—that of axenic invention? Impossible, says Eliot. As helium explains successful his effort “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” whenever you effort to write, you are influenced, consciously oregon otherwise, by what came earlier you. From wherever other could you get your language? Your storylines? Your imagery? Your characters? Which means you tin either beryllium unwittingly guided by the lit of the past—and gaffe into the dull grooves of cliché—or instrumentality it up and crook it to caller purposes. Shakespeare cribbed astir each his plots from Plutarch and Ovid, Boccaccio and Holinshed; what matters is that helium made them his own.
How tin 1 propulsion disconnected this originative heist? Integration, Eliot continues: “The bully writer welds his theft into a full of feeling which is unique, utterly antithetic from that from which it was torn; the atrocious writer throws it into thing which has nary cohesion.” Immature work, successful different words, is cobbled together, a copy-pasted messiness of prefab verbiage whose interaction pales successful examination to the originals it apes. Mature writers, by contrast, instrumentality a much inside-out approach, weaving the ideas of the past into a new, emotionally intuited whole. It is this felt unity, and the painstaking craftsmanship required to seizure it successful language, that separates the inexpensive transcript from the caller take, the derivative enactment from the almighty retelling.
Eliot’s kleptomaxim—often smoothed retired to “Good artists borrow, large artists steal”—reminds america that artists don’t make thing retired of nothing, but are everlastingly rehammering aged worldly into caller shapes. You tin bash truthful with nary wide consciousness of feeling, lifelessly parroting the worldly of the past, or, with cautious eye, attentive ear, and keen affectional sensibility, articulate a “whole of feeling” and daze aged ideas to life.
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Though Eliot’s enactment is good known, the effort it comes from is little so. In “Philip Massinger,” Eliot explores however the titular Jacobean dramatist drew connected Shakespeare yet failed to rival him successful richness of expression. Alternating excerpts of their works with observations connected however they differ, Eliot shows however Massinger fell unfortunate to tracing, with little vigor, the enactment of his mighty predecessor.
Massinger: Can I telephone backmost yesterday, with each their aids
That bow unto my sceptre? oregon restore
My caput to that tranquillity and peace
It past enjoyed?
Shakespeare: Not poppy, nor mandragora,
Nor each the drowsy syrops of the world
Shall ever medecine thee to that saccharine sleep
Which thou owedst yesterday.
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Eliot was a maestro burglar himself, his plunder glittering crossed the barrens of his magnum opus, The Waste Land, with astir fractional the enactment consisting of phrases and imagery pinched from sources ranging from Chaucer to Dante, Baudelaire to the Bible. As Eliot fesses up toward the extremity of his mixtape, “These fragments I person shored against my ruins.”
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Fittingly, Eliot’s dictum connected creator appropriation is not without precursors of its own. In a Gentleman’s Magazine article from 1892 titled “Imitators and Plagiarists,” W.H. Davenport Adams analyzed the ways successful which the English writer Tennyson was influenced by his forebears. Noting however the writer “adopts an representation oregon a proposition from a predecessor, and works it up into his ain glittering fabric,” Davenport generalized his findings with the declaration that “great poets imitate and improve, whereas tiny ones bargain and spoil.” Was Eliot’s rendition a blatant rip-off? A stylistic tweak? A specified coincidence? Or, to Eliot’s point, yet different stab astatine a timeless, ever-evolving idea?*
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“We archer ourselves stories successful bid to live.”
–Joan Didion, 1979
Bad things happen, and astir immediately, the caput scrambles to marque consciousness of them. Every acheronian lawsuit indispensable beryllium absorbed into a broader narrative, each convulsive enactment slotted into a legible worldview. “We archer ourselves stories successful bid to live,” writes Joan Didion astatine the commencement of her effort “The White Album.” Without them, beingness is conscionable excessively scary.
We look for the sermon successful the suicide, for the societal oregon motivation acquisition successful the execution of five…We unrecorded entirely, particularly if we are writers, by the imposition of a communicative enactment upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we person learned to frost the shifting phantasmagoria which is our existent experience.
What happens, then, erstwhile our meaning-making powers commencement to fray? When the ferment is excessively wild, the events excessively jarring—the violence, rather literally, excessively senseless? In the narrative-shattering tumult of late-sixties California, that’s precisely, says Didion, what happened. Jumping haphazardly from the Ferguson brothers’ execution trial, to the shooting of Black Panther Party laminitis Huey Newton, to the Manson Family slaughter of Sharon Tate and others, to off-kilter episodes from her idiosyncratic life, Didion’s effort shimmers with the paranoid, hallucinatory glow of the period. Cults, drugs, militants, Scientologists, fired-up revolutionaries and listless stone stars, weird telephone calls and random walk-ins, backstage investigators and conspiratorial trucks—all of it churns successful a disorienting, sinister brew. Describing, among different horrors, the communicative of a five-year-old miss near to dice connected the median of an interstate, each Didion could reason was that “these images did not acceptable into immoderate communicative I knew.”
Her nonaccomplishment of the crippled wasn’t conscionable social, either, but personal, arsenic though she had been shocked retired of the communicative of her ain life, dislocated from the satellite until her relation successful it nary longer felt real.
I appeared, connected the look of it, a competent capable subordinate of immoderate assemblage oregon another, a signer of contracts and Air Travel cards, a citizen…This was an capable adequate performance, arsenic improvisations go. The lone occupation was that my full education, everything I had ever been told oregon had told myself, insisted that the accumulation was ne'er meant to beryllium improvised…I was expected to perceive cues, and nary longer did. I was meant to cognize the plot, but each I knew was what I saw: flash pictures successful adaptable sequence, images with nary “meaning” beyond their impermanent arrangement.
Didion logged her confusions successful writing; they besides showed up connected the scanner. After a bid of ocular disturbances and a artillery of tests, Didion was fixed an “exclusionary” diagnosis of aggregate sclerosis. The illness would stay successful remission for the remainder of her life, but the ambiguous and tentative findings were astatine erstwhile distressing and revelatory. “The startling information was this: my assemblage was offering a precise physiological equivalent to what had been going connected successful my mind.”
Didion’s reflections connected our request to marque consciousness of the senseless, and connected the hollowed-out acquisition of our nonaccomplishment to bash so, are a profound anti-narrative of idiosyncratic and corporate crisis. Proliferating ideologies, baffling violence, the escaped threads of a rapidly changing satellite successful which “all connections were arsenic meaningful, and arsenic senseless”—Didion doesn’t connection solutions to these cognitive leap cuts oregon paranoid patterns, doesn’t constitute a soothing publication for america each to sing on to. All she does, each anyone honorable tin do, is support looking, noticing, jotting down impressions, struggling for sense, putting unneurotic pieces of the story.
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From her effort “The White Album,” primitively published successful New West magazine successful 1979 and released successful a measurement of essays of the aforesaid sanction aboriginal that year. Taking its rubric from the Beatles’ 1968 LP nickname, the effort nods, different silently, not conscionable to an iconic medium of the period, nor adjacent to the affectional blankness evoked by its cover, but to the manically charged euphony within—and successful particular, to the opus “Helter Skelter,” which was interpreted by Charles Manson arsenic prophesying an apocalyptic contention warfare that inspired him to perpetrate savage acts of unit specified arsenic those perpetrated, astatine his behest, successful the infamous Tate-LaBianca murders. White and black, colour and pallor, hidden meanings and meaningless violence—Didion’s rubric alludes to it all: the appalling incoherence of evil and its emotion-stunting effects; the paranoiac’s excess of connections and the depressive’s vacuum of sense; breakdowns successful intelligibility and the need, contempt it all, to understand.
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There’s an easy missed ambiguity to Didion’s reflection that “we archer ourselves stories successful bid to live.” Just arsenic communicative tin shatter into senseless fragments and permission america detached, confused, and lost, truthful excessively tin it harden into the comforting sermon, the militant ideology, the pat motivation philosophy, the cult conspiracy. Telling stories whitethorn beryllium a captious imperative—something we cannot bash without—but cling to them excessively tightly and they go a delusion and an insulation. Between abyss and ideology, chaos and fishy clarity, Didion deftly walks america done the affluent and ambiguous middle, telling the communicative without preaching the lesson, signaling the country without rounding disconnected its bumps. If we archer ourselves stories successful bid to live, Didion reminds america that we indispensable besides defy casual answers and ready-made interpretations; we indispensable study what we spot arsenic truthfully arsenic we can.
We Tell Ourselves Stories successful Order to Live was aboriginal the rubric of her publication of collected nonfiction, published successful 2006.
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Excerpted from Phrased & Confused: The Curious Meanings of Timeless Quotations by Eli Burnstein. Copyright © 2026 by Eli Burnstein. Published and reprinted by support of Abrams. All rights reserved.
English (US) ·