War & Peace Quote by John Astin

Astin is defending a kind of knowing that doesn’t win debates but does reach the work. He frames intuition not as airy mysticism, but as a practical tool for where humans still fall short: “our stage of development” suggests we’re unfinished creatures, using whatever instruments we have. Logic is powerful, he concedes, just not always sufficient. That’s a quietly radical stance in a culture that treats rationality as the default badge of seriousness.

The pivot to Poe is the tell. Poe’s stories run on fever logic: they’re meticulous, patterned, almost mathematical in how they build dread, yet they’re ultimately about states of mind that refuse tidy explanation. When Astin says “a great logician could be an enemy to him,” he’s talking about the reader (or critic) who insists everything must resolve into “conventional world reason” - the commonsense daylight rules that keep the uncanny at bay. Poe’s art depends on violating those rules while sounding eerily persuasive. Over-policing it with rational interpretations can flatten the experience into a puzzle with an answer, instead of a descent with consequences.

Coming from an actor, the subtext is also professional: performance lives in the realm of felt truth. You can analyze a character’s motives all day; on stage you still have to leap - into tone, rhythm, impulse, the half-second choices that aren’t fully articulable. Astin is arguing for respecting the irrational as a legitimate human register, and for reading Poe (and maybe people) with instruments sensitive enough to pick up what daylight logic misses.