following quote is taken from gertrude steins first lecture of four on social engineering titled narration. in this lecture she lays the ground for what follows in the other three. here she explains how long it takes to change society
"it is a rather curious thing that it should take a hundred years to change anything that is to change something, it is the human habit to think in centuries and centuries are more or less a hundred years ...
it is the human habit to think in centuries from a grandparent to a grandchild because it just does take about a hundred years for things to cease to have the same meanings that they had before, ...
so then there we are a hundred years does more or less make a century and this is determined by the fact that it includes a grandparent to a grandchild and that that is what makes it definitely different one time from another time ...
i am quite sure that the world's history the world made up of human beings is made up in this way of about always a century and it is determined that imade by the natural filling up of time from a grandparent to a grandchild. ...
that is what narrative is that twenty-five years roll around so quickly but that one hundred years do not roll around at all but that they end. ...
but before going on to this matter i have just been thinking that the civil war in america was another case of about a century, seventeen sixty to eighteen sixty again made a grandfather to a granddaughter a grandmother to a grandson and so as usual everything changed as it always has done very likely it will do so again, very likely a century every so often will do what a century always has done. ...
literature we may say is what goes on all the time history is what goes on from time to time and this is what is terribly important to think about in connection with narrative."
gertrude stein, narration.
Sent from my iPad
