"It is obvious that we can no more explain a passion to a person who has never experienced it than we can explain light to the blind"
About this Quote
Eliot sets a trap for the overconfident explainer: he pairs “passion” with “light” to argue that some realities aren’t missing information, they’re missing apparatus. The line doesn’t flatter emotion so much as it limits the mind’s jurisdiction. Passion, for Eliot, isn’t a thesis you can walk someone through; it’s a mode of perception that reorganizes the world the way sight reorganizes space. By choosing blindness as the comparison, he makes the point uncomfortably physical. This isn’t about being stubborn or unromantic. It’s about the hard boundary between description and lived sensation.
The intent is partly defensive, partly diagnostic. Eliot had a lifelong suspicion of gushy self-disclosure and the Victorian habit of treating feeling as proof. Here he flips that: feeling can be intensely real and still resist translation. “Obvious” is doing sly work, too. It’s a rhetorical shrug that dares you to object, as if any attempt to argue back would only demonstrate the problem - you’d be trying to reason your way into an experience.
The subtext carries a modernist sting. In an era of psychoanalysis, self-help moralizing, and the growing prestige of “explaining” people to themselves, Eliot insists on the irreducible: interior states are not fully communicable, and language has a ceiling. The line also polices intimacy. If passion can’t be explained, then confession is never the whole story; the listener may only ever receive an approximation, a metaphor, a shadow on the wall.
The intent is partly defensive, partly diagnostic. Eliot had a lifelong suspicion of gushy self-disclosure and the Victorian habit of treating feeling as proof. Here he flips that: feeling can be intensely real and still resist translation. “Obvious” is doing sly work, too. It’s a rhetorical shrug that dares you to object, as if any attempt to argue back would only demonstrate the problem - you’d be trying to reason your way into an experience.
The subtext carries a modernist sting. In an era of psychoanalysis, self-help moralizing, and the growing prestige of “explaining” people to themselves, Eliot insists on the irreducible: interior states are not fully communicable, and language has a ceiling. The line also polices intimacy. If passion can’t be explained, then confession is never the whole story; the listener may only ever receive an approximation, a metaphor, a shadow on the wall.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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