Suspended judgments: Essays on books and sensations
About this book
General Books publication 2009 Original publication 1916 Original G.A. Shaw French literature English literature Literary Criticism / General Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Literary Criticism / European / French This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. THE ART OF DISCRIMINATION THE world divides itself into people who can discriminate and people who cannot discriminate. This is the ultimate test of sensitiveness; and sensitiveness alone separates us and unites us. We all create, or have created for us by the fatality of our temperament, a unique and individual universe. It is only by bringing into light the most secret and subtle elements of this self- contained system of things that we can find out where our lonely orbits touch. Like all primordial aspects of life the situation is double-edged and contradictory. The further we emphasise and drag forth, out of their reluctant twilight, the lurking attractions and antipathies of our destiny, the nearer, at once, and the more obscure, we find ourselves growing, to those about us. And the wisdom of the difficult game we are called upon to play, lies in just this very antinomy, -- in just this very contradiction -- that to make ourselves better understood we have to emphasise our differences, and to touch the universe of our friend we have to travel away from him, on a curve of free sky. The cultivation of what in us is lonely andunique creates of necessity a perpetual series of shocks and jars. The unruffled nerves of the lower animals become enviable, and we fall into moods of malicious reaction and vindictive recoil. And yet, -- for Nature makes use even of what is named evil to pursu...