"Obvious enough that generalities work to protect the mind from the great outdoors; is it possible that this was in fact their first purpose?"
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Generalities, in Nemerov's dry framing, aren't just intellectual shortcuts; they're psychic shelter. The line lands like an offhand aside, but it's a small accusation: we congratulate ourselves for thinking in big, portable categories, when the real motive may be avoidance. "The great outdoors" isn't a pastoral postcard here. It's the raw, unfiltered particularity of the world - weather, bodies, chance, pain, beauty - all the stuff that refuses to behave like an idea. Generalities let the mind stay indoors.
The sentence is built to mimic the very habit it criticizes. "Obvious enough" performs a shrug, as if we're already supposed to know this, and the question that follows slides the knife in: maybe abstraction wasn't invented for clarity at all, but for comfort. That's the subtext: human cognition as a defensive architecture. We don't only generalize to understand; we generalize to reduce exposure. A category can be a blanket.
As a mid-century poet with a keen eye for how language fails and flatters us, Nemerov is writing into a culture that increasingly trusted systems - psychology, bureaucracy, academic theory, political rhetoric - to tame lived reality. His suspicion reads now as pre-internet but highly current: the more we talk in templates (hot takes, demographics, "narratives"), the less contact we have with what doesn't fit. The wit is that he doesn't sermonize; he merely wonders aloud, and the wondering implicates us. If generalities are protective, the cost is sensory and moral: fewer encounters with the world as it is, and fewer obligations to respond to its irreducible details.
The sentence is built to mimic the very habit it criticizes. "Obvious enough" performs a shrug, as if we're already supposed to know this, and the question that follows slides the knife in: maybe abstraction wasn't invented for clarity at all, but for comfort. That's the subtext: human cognition as a defensive architecture. We don't only generalize to understand; we generalize to reduce exposure. A category can be a blanket.
As a mid-century poet with a keen eye for how language fails and flatters us, Nemerov is writing into a culture that increasingly trusted systems - psychology, bureaucracy, academic theory, political rhetoric - to tame lived reality. His suspicion reads now as pre-internet but highly current: the more we talk in templates (hot takes, demographics, "narratives"), the less contact we have with what doesn't fit. The wit is that he doesn't sermonize; he merely wonders aloud, and the wondering implicates us. If generalities are protective, the cost is sensory and moral: fewer encounters with the world as it is, and fewer obligations to respond to its irreducible details.
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| Topic | Deep |
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