i am labouriously working my way through Douglas Hofstadtr’s book about translating Marot stanzas, i should quit, it’s shit, but occasionally it has fantastic paragraphs, or i find it can pack an odd small fact that smacks my crack.. how about this start to a lipogrammatic book that lacks a particular commonly occuring part of our ABC’s…
Gadsby by Wright. 1932
If Youth, throughout all history, had had a champion to stand up for it; to show a doubting world that a child can think; and, possibly, do it practically, you wouldn’t constantly run across folks today who claim that “a child don’t know anything.” A child’s brain starts functioning at birth; and has, amongst its many infant convolutions, thousands of dormant atoms, into which God has put a mystic possibility for noticing an adult’s act, and figuring out its purport.Up to about its primary school days a child thinks, naturally, only of play. But many a form of play contains disciplinary factor. “You can’t do this,” or “that puts out out,” shows a child that it must think, practically, or fail. Now, if, throughout childhood, a brain has no opposition, it is plain that it will attain a position of “status quo,” as with our ordinary animals. Man knows not why a cow, dog, or lion was not born with a brain on a par with ours; why such animals cannot add, subtract, or obtain from books and schooling, that paramount position which Man Holds today.
But a human brain is not in that class. Constantly throbbing and pulsating, it rapidly forms opinions; attaining an ability of its own; a fact which is startlingly shown by an occasional child “prodigy” in music or school work. And as, with our dumb animals, a child’s inability convincingly to impart its thoughts to us, should not class it as ignorant.
bravo!