Possession of language is a defining mark of our humanity, and it has been faithfully accompanying us ever since our branch first emerged as a distinct species.
In Prague, when Tomas and Tereza brought a new chair or moved a flower pot, Karenin would look on in displeasure. It disturbed his sense of time. Nonetheless, he soon managed to reestablish the old order and old rituals in the Zurich flat.
In periods of despair, she would remind herself she had to hold on because of him, because he was weaker than she, weaker perhaps even than Dubcek and their abandoned homeland.
When she said that Tomas wasn’t there and she didn’t know when he’d be back, the woman on the other end of the line started laughing and, without saying good-bye, hung up.
It was then that she realized she had lost the last bit of strength she had had at home; she was absolutely incapable of tolerating this absolutely insignificant incident.
The fact that they loved each other was merely proof that the fault lay not in themselves, in their behavior or inconstancy of feeling, but rather in their incompatibility; he was strong and she was weak.
They were no longer occasional practitioners of art, as the cave painters had been, but full professionals — i.e., men skilled in a specialized occupation, practicing it full-time and probably earning all of their livelihood from it.
But even the relatively simple definition of a professional as a person receiving pay for carrying out a specialized occupation on a full-time basis is difficult to apply to the arts.
Nearly everywhere and always, music, architecture, and poetry have been regarded as professions, while pottery making has been regarded as an art and granted the dignity of a profession only in some non?Western cultures.
The attempt to gain for some of the arts the status of learned or quasi-learned professions resulted in a distinction between “the fine arts" and “the applied arts", a distinction that has done harm to both.
The gradual breakdown of the attitude that permitted such exclusive categories to be created and the general rejection of the false distinctions between art and utility are encouraging developments in the arts in recent times.
Michelson’s work is valuable, as a reflection of the day to day responsibilities of Mesquakie women, yet as is often the case with life?passage studies, it presents little of the central character’s psychological motivation.
For example, in Maria Campbell’s account of growing up as a Canadian Metis who was influenced strongly by the non?native American world around her, one learns a great deal about the life of native American women, but Campbell’s individual story, which is told to us directly, is always the center of her narrative.
As anthropologist Ralph Lonton said, “The last thing a fish would ever notice would be water." So it is with people: except in unusual circumstances, the effects of our own culture generally remain imperceptible to us.
No longer could I count on people to stare only surreptitiously, to take precautions against invisible microbes, or to stand in an orderly way one behind the other on the basis of time of arrival to obtain a service.
