Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Morgan

"It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience"

Robert Morgan, Soldier

About this Quote

Less a writer flex than a field test: Morgan frames language as something you push to its breaking point to see what reality leaks through. Calling it "less a literary thing" is a pointed demotion of artiness, a refusal of the cozy idea that words exist to decorate experience. He wants language stripped of costume and put back into work boots: linguistic, philosophical, preoccupied. That last term matters. A preoccupation is not a hobby; its closer to a compulsion, the kind you get when youve seen enough of the world to distrust easy description.

The real charge is in "how far you can go". Morgan is talking about extremity, not refinement. As a soldier, he would have lived in the zone where sensation is sudden, physical, and morally loud. In that setting, conventional language often fails: it either turns brutal facts into clichés or embalms them with euphemism. His ambition is to find a verbal method that produces "immediate, elementary experience" in the reader - not a mediated anecdote, not an interpretation, but a jolt. "Elementary" here isnt simplistic; its elemental, like heat or fear or hunger: the stuff that comes before explanation.

Subtext: suspicion of narrative comfort. He is chasing a prose that recreates first contact with the world, before the mind starts filing events into genre (heroism, tragedy, patriotism). The philosophical edge is epistemic: what can words actually deliver? Morgans answer is pragmatic and severe - language is valuable only insofar as it can make experience present, unsoftened, and un-negotiable.

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Topic	Writing

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About the Author

Robert Morgan (July 31, 1918 - May 15, 2004) was a Soldier from USA.

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