"I can see now that a concept or even a feeling makes no sense unless out of our substance we spin around it a web of references, of relationships, of values"
About this Quote
Meaning, for Maillart, isn’t something you discover and then carry around like a clean specimen in a jar. It’s something you manufacture out of lived material. The sentence turns on that sly, almost unsettling phrase: “out of our substance.” She’s not talking about ideas as airy abstractions; she’s talking about the self as raw silk, and meaning as the web we spin from it. A “concept” or “feeling” isn’t invalid because it’s false, but because it’s untethered - no references, no relationships, no values to give it traction.
Maillart’s intent reads like a corrective to the romantic myth of pure feeling. She’s insisting that emotion without context is noise, and that thought without a human network is sterile. The subtext is quietly anti-individualist: what makes something intelligible isn’t private intensity but the scaffolding of association we build with other people, places, memories, moral commitments. That’s why “web” is doing so much work here. It suggests connection, but also entanglement: you can’t make meaning without getting caught in it.
Coming from a 20th-century travel writer who moved through cultures, borders, and belief systems, the line feels earned rather than theoretical. Travel, at its best, doesn’t just add new “experiences”; it forces you to audit your internal reference list. Maillart is describing that moment when the world gets bigger and your old categories stop fitting - and you realize sense-making is an act of weaving, not receiving.
Maillart’s intent reads like a corrective to the romantic myth of pure feeling. She’s insisting that emotion without context is noise, and that thought without a human network is sterile. The subtext is quietly anti-individualist: what makes something intelligible isn’t private intensity but the scaffolding of association we build with other people, places, memories, moral commitments. That’s why “web” is doing so much work here. It suggests connection, but also entanglement: you can’t make meaning without getting caught in it.
Coming from a 20th-century travel writer who moved through cultures, borders, and belief systems, the line feels earned rather than theoretical. Travel, at its best, doesn’t just add new “experiences”; it forces you to audit your internal reference list. Maillart is describing that moment when the world gets bigger and your old categories stop fitting - and you realize sense-making is an act of weaving, not receiving.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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