"The fact is that the learning process goes on, and so long as the voices are not stilled and the singers go on singing some of it gets through"
About this Quote
Learning, in Morris West's view, isn't a curriculum you complete; it's a signal you keep transmitting in the dark, hoping someone on the other end still has the receiver on. The line turns education into an ongoing act of cultural resistance: not a ladder of credentials, but a stubborn persistence of human expression. "Voices" and "singers" aren't just literal artists. They're teachers, dissidents, parents, journalists, novelists - anyone insisting on meaning when the surrounding machinery wants quiet.
West writes like a mid-century novelist who watched institutions harden and ideologies metastasize. That context matters: a Catholic-tinged humanist coming out of the postwar era, wary of totalizing systems but still betting on the person. The passive construction - "some of it gets through" - is the tell. He isn't promising a clean victory for enlightenment. He's describing survival rates. Knowledge leaks past censors, past fatigue, past the thick skull of the present. It is, at best, a smuggled good.
The phrase "so long as the voices are not stilled" carries a quiet threat: silence can be imposed, and history is full of regimes and markets that know how to do it. West's optimism is conditional and communal. The learning process "goes on" only if people keep making noise, keep performing, keep narrating the world back to itself. It's a credo for the long haul: don't fetishize impact, protect the conditions of expression, and trust that persistence has a cumulative force even when it doesn't look like progress.
West writes like a mid-century novelist who watched institutions harden and ideologies metastasize. That context matters: a Catholic-tinged humanist coming out of the postwar era, wary of totalizing systems but still betting on the person. The passive construction - "some of it gets through" - is the tell. He isn't promising a clean victory for enlightenment. He's describing survival rates. Knowledge leaks past censors, past fatigue, past the thick skull of the present. It is, at best, a smuggled good.
The phrase "so long as the voices are not stilled" carries a quiet threat: silence can be imposed, and history is full of regimes and markets that know how to do it. West's optimism is conditional and communal. The learning process "goes on" only if people keep making noise, keep performing, keep narrating the world back to itself. It's a credo for the long haul: don't fetishize impact, protect the conditions of expression, and trust that persistence has a cumulative force even when it doesn't look like progress.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
|---|
More Quotes by Morris
Add to List
