"Supposing everyone lived at one time what would they say. They would observe that stringing string beans is universal"
About this Quote
Stein turns the most unglamorous domestic task into a sly weapon against grand theories of human nature. The opening gambit, "Supposing everyone lived at one time", sounds like the setup for sweeping historical wisdom: imagine the whole human story compressed into a single, legible moment. Then she undercuts that appetite for totalizing insight with a punchline so plain it’s almost abrasive: "stringing string beans is universal". If you came looking for a moral, you get kitchen prep.
That misdirection is the point. Stein is teasing the way intellectuals talk about "universals" as if they’re lofty, metaphysical truths. Her universal isn’t love or death or freedom; it’s repetitive handwork, the kind of labor that rarely earns philosophy’s attention. The subtext is feminist without announcing itself: what counts as "human experience" gets decided by whoever isn’t stuck doing the tedious work. By making bean-stringing the common denominator, she smuggles overlooked lives into the category of the meaningful.
Formally, the sentence enacts Stein’s Modernist suspicion of clean argument. The stuttery rhythm ("stringing string beans") is both literal and linguistic: language doing the same action it describes, looping, stripping meaning down to texture and repetition. Context matters too. Stein writes in an era obsessed with big systems - history as progress, psychology as explanation, art as manifesto. Her joke is that if you really did flatten time, the result might not be enlightenment. It might be chores. And maybe that’s the truer universal.
That misdirection is the point. Stein is teasing the way intellectuals talk about "universals" as if they’re lofty, metaphysical truths. Her universal isn’t love or death or freedom; it’s repetitive handwork, the kind of labor that rarely earns philosophy’s attention. The subtext is feminist without announcing itself: what counts as "human experience" gets decided by whoever isn’t stuck doing the tedious work. By making bean-stringing the common denominator, she smuggles overlooked lives into the category of the meaningful.
Formally, the sentence enacts Stein’s Modernist suspicion of clean argument. The stuttery rhythm ("stringing string beans") is both literal and linguistic: language doing the same action it describes, looping, stripping meaning down to texture and repetition. Context matters too. Stein writes in an era obsessed with big systems - history as progress, psychology as explanation, art as manifesto. Her joke is that if you really did flatten time, the result might not be enlightenment. It might be chores. And maybe that’s the truer universal.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|
More Quotes by Gertrude
Add to List
