"I am and, for as long as I can remember, I have always been a poor visualizer. Words, even the
pregnant words of poets, do not evoke pictures in my mind. No hypnagogic visions greet me on the
verge of sleep. When I recall something, the memory does not present itself to me as a vividly seen
event or object. By an effort of the will, I can evoke a not very vivid image of what happened yesterday
afternoon, of how the Lungarno used to look before the bridges were destroyed, of the Bayswater
Road when the only buses were green and tiny and drawn by aged horses at three and a half miles an
hour. But such images have little substance and absolutely no autonomous life of their own. They stand
to real, perceived objects in the same relation as Homer's ghosts stood to the men of flesh and blood,
who came to visit them in the shades. Only when I have a high temperature do my mental images come
to independent life. To those in whom the faculty of visualization is strong my inner world must seem
curiously drab, limited and uninteresting. This was the world - a poor thing but my own - which I
expected to see transformed into something completely unlike itself"
Poets pack a lot of meaning / emotion into their words — you could think of them as “full” of the stuff that makes up life, like a pregnant woman is more literally filled with another life.
There are apparently two independent derivations of the word "pregnant" (though the roots may join), confusingly, both adjectives. Other than "with child", there is:
"convincing, weighty, pithy," late 14c., "cogent, convincing, compelling" (of evidence, an argument, etc.); sense of "full of meaning" is from c. 1400. According to OED from Old French preignant, present participle of preindre "press, squeeze, stamp, crush," from earlier priembre, from Latin premere "to press, hold fast, cover, crowd, compress" (from PIE root per- (4) "to strike").*
Probably the most common use of this meaning for "pregnant" in English is a "pregnant pause"; which are the points during speech where you pause for effect.
No man i just tried to search pregnant words of poets and found lots of poems about pregnancy which i liked some of them. I don't advise you to read though.
Your confusion is endearing it makes me smile with compassion. Bless you.
The word pregnant is used symbolically - a woman carries a child with great effort (the symbology gets even more significant if we consider the act of sex before the pregnancy) - and the child
Is born with great pain, but eventually happiness of the parents.
So this symbol of promise-of-joy-at-end-of-suffering, when combined with the symbol of the word (as carrier of meaning) gives birth (see how im using birth here to explain something? Its a similar mechanism) to a new symbol, “pregnant words” - these words written during great emotional storms, and attempt to draw a picture of immense meaning and beauty to those who read it, if they are also in the right state of mind to understand.
Even trying to truly explain what it is, is kind of difficult.
We humans actually are “complex symbol creators” - rather than “language users” - its a wonder we understand each other at all sometimes, and its no wonder that we disagree so much.
Ha! Ok... sorry. I wasn't entirely sure, "pregnant words of poets" are themselves pregnant words of a poet, after all.
Anyway, I wasn't trying to be condescending by pointing you at a dictionary -- I'm not a native speaker myself and thought you might find it useful the next time you come across something that doesn't immediately make sense.
For what it's worth, this native speaker only just a few minutes ago discovered that there are two independently derived roots of "pregnant". (See earlier comment.)
"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”
If you're in London you can buy the book (comes with Heaven and Hell) for £4 at the Old Spitalfields Market. Tell the guy "the one in the yellow jacket sent me".
He will be prompted to say something along the lines of "sorry feller, I don't know who you mean". This will mark the completion of his assignment as it was intended. What is expected from you as the participant will be to nod along and move on, after completing the monetary transaction, of course. This way he will know that you have completed your part too. Otherwise there is a chance to set off a sequence of events that may be most full of misfortune for anyone involved.
Relatedly, I just finished reading How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan, which does a great job of detailing the fascinating history of psychedelics and the current very promising resurgence of scientific research. It also does as good a job as one can expect at actually explaining what they are like, including descriptions of his own personal trips.
After reading the book, I wouldn't be surprised to see legal clinics open to the public in the US in the next 10-15 years.
Yes, I'd seen this claim once before. The original quote was "There are things known, and things unknown, and in between are the Doors", yet a quick search led to this explanation: "QI hypothesizes that this quotation was streamlined and then the words were reassigned to more prominent figures such as Jim Morrison, Aldous Huxley and William Blake" on https://quoteinvestigator.com/tag/the-doors.
As an aside: The Doors (the band), in addition to being named after the book and having a classically-trained pianist, basically delved into a different genre with each album. The Electra label also had their albums put on early CDs in 1980/1981 made in West Germany.
I always thought this book pretty dull. Different topic, but if you want to read Huxley, Brave new world is great. Alternatively if you want to read about the experiences of early psychedelic users, Leary's psychedelic experience is better.
Yeap. I read it in high school many moons ago. I should probably read it again, before and after dropping acid, just to understand the context. With each year and season of our lives, we see the world through different, hopefully wiser yet still youthfully-enthusiastic, eyes.
> In some other countries, including Canada, copyright term is life plus 50 years, and in those countries C.S. Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Robert Frost, Jean Cocteau, and the famous poet Sylvia Path, who all died in 1963, enter the public domain in 2014.
