Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos Quotes

“There is a little dull ache for Oblomov and his dreams. Man does not live by bread alone, not even by the most wholesome bread punctually served. There is dream-stuff as well as bread-stuff. Sometimes man's strength is to sit still.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos

“It is this living into things that a new generation demands, and it is this, because she is young among the nations, that Russia has to offer.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos

“Language, after the purely emotional interjection, began with whole sentences, holophrases, utterances of a relation in which subject and object have not yet got their heads above water, but are still submerged in a situation. A holophrase utters a holopsychosis. Out of these holophrases emerge our familiar 'Parts of Speech' rightly so called for speech was before its partition. [...] Uneducated and impulsive people even to-day tend to show a certain holophrastic savagery. They not infrequently plunge into a statement of relations before they tell you who they are talking about.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos

“Hebrew is a language which has no tenses at all, it has only aspects.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos

“To take a single and salient instance, to study the folk-epos of Russia, alive in the mouths of the people up to and beyond the time of Peter the Great, is to look at Homer with new and wider opened eyes.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos

“Immediately what we get from Russia, is the impulse to live in the living fact, rather than outside it, to look to process, durée, rather than to achievement. Specially I think we need this in morals. We plume ourselves as moralists and have by more dispassionate critics been dubbed hypocrites. Morality is I think the vice of the perfective; it is the judging of an act by its results. A governing people will always emphasize results. Results can be tabulated, they are the basis of statistics, the stuff of which codes and 'strong government' are made. Such perfective morality has its uses, great uses, but it is not an end in itself and its value is easily over-estimated. It has its subtle dangers. As soon as you judge, if even you plead in the criminal's favor, you begin to move away.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos

“This aversion to the abstract and generalized, this love of living into the live individual fact is I think at the bottom of all the well-known, just now too well-known, Russian characteristics. The Russian has a horror of abstractions, while no Teuton, we are told, can resist a generalization. [...] The Slav has little love of the state, i.e. for man's collective order imposed on the individual, hence his incapacity for discipline, efficiency, collective progress. For him the wonder of the world is the individual not the class, the complexity of life not its simplification, least of all its abstraction.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos

“It is part of the great spiritual riches of the Russian that, because he sees or rather feels things living from the inside (imperfective) he sees or rather feels things whole (asyndeta). It is a corollary from his living into things, for life is durée unanalysed, undistributed. These asyndeta, these bits of life so closely bound together that they refuse conjunctions, are countless in Russian, specially in epic and peasant Russian.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos

“Mr. Murry thinks that what makes the terror, the frighteningness of Dostoevsky's greatest characters is that, living though they are, terribly alive, they are not primarily individuals, they are incarnate ideas, abstractions made to live by sheer imaginative genius.

This might seem to militate against my view that the method of Dostoevsky is imperfective. If these characters are abstractions then ipso facto they are perfective. In reality the theory is my strongest support. The characters are abstractions, but by sheer force of the sympathy, the imperfectiveness of Dostoevsky's mind they become incarnate.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos

“M. Jacques Rivière appears to know no Russian and says no words of 'aspects', but what he explains as his meaning is simply this, that the Russian novel is written in the imperfective, written from within not without, lived not thought about. This modern Russian method is to M. Rivière the exact opposite of symbolist work, where everything is known beforehand, everything achieved then thought or felt about from outside and above.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos

“The idle mind, which demands rules, i.e. recipes for making correct sentences, and shirks the subtler task of understanding the speaker's point of view and living into his emotion will never either use or understand aspects aright. If the speaker is living into the action, sympathizing with it, he will use imperfective, if he stands outside and merely states a fact or a judgment he will instinctively use the perfective”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos

“The Slav is not much interested in order whether of space or time; hence his winning habit if he comes to call on you of staying to talk till the small hours of next morning, time is for slaves not for Slavs; he is interested in something immeasurably more important, in quality of action and in sympathy with action. He does not care to stand outside an action to register, to analyse, to judge, he wants to live into it, he craves 'knowledge by experience'. Hence though it would seem his temperament is inherently imperfective, he is also very sensitive to the perfective attitude.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos

“The step out of the actual into the remembered and the hoped for is really a leap of tremendous genius, it is the beginning of all generalization, of all imagination, all science, all art, all religion, all philosophy. It is the first impersonal move, man's first attempt to stand outside himself and view the world undebauched by immediate reaction.

Abstraction then rather than achievement is — if I am right — from the outset the very pith and marrow of the perfective. [...] The perfective is the aorist, not indefinite, ill-defined in time but out of time, remote from durée as Bergson would say, free from the hot intimacy of personal experience.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos

“Is the savage then with his holophrases impersonal? [...] Far from it, he is intensely personal — only he is all personal experience. He cannot cut himself loose from his activities. Language again is the best evidence. A New Caledonian expressing the fact that some fruit was not high enough for the native palate, said not 'it-not-yet-eatable' but 'we-not-yet-eatable.' Egotism could scarcely go further. Now — and this is my point — if we were asked what was the aspect of the savage holophrase, we should answer without a moment's hesitation, it is imperfective — it is the very incarnation of the imperfective, it expresses actual duration, or as I should prefer to call it actual, personal experience. The imperfective lies at the very beginning of things.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos

“The more primitive a language is the less it abstracts. [...] As the language with its people advances in civilization it classifies, i.e. abstracts and simplifies more and more; it sees common qualities and drops out those distinctions that do not subserve life. A similar process may be observed in the formation of what we call Parts of Speech.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos

“[K]nowing how primitive in many aspects, now little abstract, how uncontaminated by logic and logical structure Hebrew is, it would surely have occured to me to ask, is not aspect wherever and whenever it occurs a thing more primitive, more psychologically fundamental than time order, than tense? Was there not a time in the development of language when primitive man focussed his attention not on time order but on something else expressed by aspect, and what is that something?”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos

“No one knows better than this accomplished scholar [Professor Kennett] and no one could say more plainly that all the supposed futures in 'prophecies' have nothing to do with the future at all. Oh what burning controversies might have been saved had only theologians known a little more grammar!”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos

“I have had a suspicion all my life that in the current dictionaries and grammars often the real explanation and origin of a word or a grammatical form is to be found in something that comes in just at the end as a 'derived' form or 'exceptional' use. This I believe to be the case with the aorist; the true primitive essential aorist I believe to be the gnomic, the temporal aorist a later derivative, in fact the aorist I believe to be primarily not a tense at all but an aspect.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos

“What an aspect denotes is a kind of internal line. It is often and truly said that imperfective is like a line, it has duration, continuity, extension so to speak in space, the perfective is like a dot, a moment, as soon as it is begun it is finished. And here it is instructive to note that in Russian a certain form of perfective expresses equally well the beginning and the end of an action, the two terminal points, the two ends [...] Other illustrations point the same way, the imperfective is the open hand, the perfective the clenched fist, the imperfective is a snow-field, the perfective a snow-ball. Always we find the same notion not of time order but internal time, the imperfective has internal time but not of time order, it may be past, present or future; the perfective has no internal time, no duration, and equally its time order past, present or future is indifferent.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos

“The English language like the English people is good at particular emergencies, but hopelessly unsystematic.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos

“Aspect or quality of a verb had, I believe, nothing originally to do with time; aspect in fact cuts clean across time. Aspect in most languages is now at least indicated for the most part by adverbs. I run — quickly; I stand — still; in this sense many verbs have hundreds of aspects.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos

“Youth is, I believe, contrary to all tradition, the time when Rational Thought dominates and allures. It is because they turned on the world the eager clear-eyed curiosity of a noble child that the Greeks are always young and their language essentially the language of youth.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos

“Language is the unconscious or at least subconscious product of the group, the herd, the race, the nation. Literature is the product more or less conscious of the individual genius, using of course the tools made by the blind herd, but, after the manner of living organisms, shaping these tools even as he uses them.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos