Life & Wisdom Quote by George Oppen

“Things explain each other, not themselves” is a poet’s way of refusing the fantasy that any object arrives with its own user manual. Oppen, an Objectivist who wanted poems to be as clear as a stone and as morally awake as a witness, is arguing that meaning is relational: a thing becomes legible only in the company it keeps. The chair explains itself through the body that slumps into it, the room it belongs to, the labor that built it, the quiet social agreement that says sit here and wait. Alone, it’s just matter.

The line also carries Oppen’s political scar tissue. He was a Communist organizer in the 1930s, went silent as a poet for decades, fought in World War II, then returned to writing with a hard-earned distrust of slogans. “Things” here aren’t decorative; they’re evidence. If you want truth, Oppen implies, stop hunting for essences and start tracing networks: history, economics, love, violence, weather. The subtext is an ethical demand disguised as epistemology: don’t let abstraction replace attention.

It’s a quiet rebuke to the self-contained “self” as well. People, like objects, don’t explain themselves in isolation. We’re clarified by our attachments and contradictions, by what we touch and what touches us back. Oppen’s sentence is spare enough to sound like common sense, but it’s dynamite under the idea that reality is private, autonomous, and easily summarized.