the shells of thought

I keep thinking about something Ezra Pound said. He was talking about his time in Paris and the ‘new art’. About Picasso and the ice-block quality. About planes and patterns and vortexes. And about how some people ridicule what they don’t understand because they don’t know what thought is like. They’re only familiar with argument and gibe and opinion.

“That is to say they can only enjoy what they have been brought up to consider enjoyable, or what some essayist has talked about in mellifluous phrases. They think only “the shells of thought,” as de Gourmont calls them; the thoughts that have been already thought out by others.”

Jane Smiley said something similar once. At least it seemed similar to me. Or maybe it wasn’t similar at all. Maybe it just made sense to me. Whatever….isn’t it brilliant? The shells of thought. And doesn’t it say so much about so much?