Scheme Topics

At length, on Saturday, the last day of August, 1839, we two, brothers, and natives of Concord, weighed anchor in this river port; for Concord, too, lies under the sun, a port of entry and departure for the bodies as well as the souls of men; one shore at least exempted from all duties but such as an honest man will gladly discharge. A warm, drizzling rain had obscured the morning, and threatened to delay our voyage, but at length the leaves and grass were dried, and it came out a mild afternoon, as serene and fresh as if Nature were maturing some greater scheme of her own. After this long dripping and oozing from every pore, she began to respire again more healthily than ever. So with a vigorous shove we launched our boat from the bank, while the flags and bulrushes courtesied a God-speed, and dropped silently down the stream.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

Entification begins at arm’s length; the points of condensation in the primordial conceptual scheme are things glimpsed, not glimpses.
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)

Like rhetoric, writing is more highly organized than speech. What is more, it prides itself on transcending the boundaries of place and time within which speech must be understood. And writing has propriety. Every writing system seems torn by conflicting impulses. On the one hand it wants to include within its scope all the subjects of language itself. Writing means to be the hard copy of human life. But at the same time every writing scheme has its taboos. Much as writing wants to be inclusive, there are some areas of life it either will not or cannot discuss as well as speech. This propriety is clear in traditional and classical civilizations, where certain themes like personal confession are never entertained in writing.
—Robert Pattison, U.S. educator, critic. On Literacy: The Politics of the Word from Homer to the Age of Rock, ch. 2, Oxford University Press (1982)