Phrased & Confused, in which Eli Burnstein digs into the meaning of some of the famous literary aphorisms of all time, is available now from Abrams.
Illustration by Liana Finck.
“A rose is a rose is a rose.”
–Gertrude Stein, 1913
From the verbal contortionist who brought us a pitch-perfect insult for bland locations (“There is no there there”) and graced post-World War I writers with the tenderest nickname of all time (“The lost generation”), Gertrude Stein haunts the annals of literary history with a still more inscrutable piece of wordplay: “A rose is a rose is a rose.” Or rather, in its original phrasing—for she would tweak it over the years—“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.”
As with all poetry, Stein’s flower tautology can hardly be translated into prose without losing much along the way. Indeed, how to pick apart something that so patently resists explanation, referring only to itself and made up only of itself, like the tightly packed petals of the very thing it names?
Yet pick it apart we must, if only to bring us closer to what is unspeakable in it. For that, in essence, is what Stein is doing: banging us repeatedly against the glass window of language to show us the silent world of things on the other side. In Stein’s machine-gun phrasing, we break out of the X is Y of traditional description—a rose is a flower, my love is a rose—and are left with only the pure X is X of iteration, as if to say, “Last stop on the train of language: It’s real life from here on out.”
For while language has the power to point outward to the world, it can also grow stale, wall us in, and leave us with nothing but words, words, and more words. By stripping away centuries of semantic baggage—“rose” being so trite and overused it can scarcely evoke the actual object—Stein restored the power of language to mean beyond itself. Thrashing us with the flower in all its petal-patterned freshness, Stein would later boast, “I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.”
*
While lecturing at the University of Chicago, Stein was asked what she meant by her rose, to which she replied: “Now listen. Can’t you see that when the language was new—as it was with Chaucer and Homer—the poet could use the name of a thing and the thing was really there. He could say ‘O moon,’ ‘O sea,’ ‘O love,’ and the moon and the sea and love were really there. And can’t you see that after hundreds of years had gone by and thousands of poems had been written, he could call on those words and find that they were just worn-out literary words. The excitingness of pure being had withdrawn from them; they were just rather stale literary words. Now the poet has to work in the excitingness of pure being; he has to get back that intensity into the language.”
*
“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” first appears in Gertrude Stein’s 1913 poem “Sacred Emily” (published in her 1922 collection Geography and Plays) and reappears with variation in her later poems and writings.
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Illustrations by Liana Finck
“Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”
–T.S. Eliot, 1920
What makes a work of art original? Theft, says poet and literary critic T. S. Eliot. The only other option is to borrow, return with late fees, and pale, like a cheap photocopy, in comparison. As Eliot’s original phrasing reads, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”
What about the third way—that of pure invention? Impossible, says Eliot. As he explains in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” whenever you try to write, you are influenced, consciously or otherwise, by what came before you. From where else could you get your language? Your storylines? Your imagery? Your characters? Which means you can either be unwittingly guided by the literature of the past—and slip into the dull grooves of cliché—or take it up and bend it to new purposes. Shakespeare cribbed nearly all his plots from Plutarch and Ovid, Boccaccio and Holinshed; what matters is that he made them his own.
How can one pull off this creative heist? Integration, Eliot continues: “The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.” Immature work, in other words, is cobbled together, a copy-pasted mess of prefab verbiage whose impact pales in comparison to the originals it apes. Mature writers, by contrast, take a more inside-out approach, weaving the ideas of the past into a new, emotionally intuited whole. It is this felt unity, and the painstaking craftsmanship required to capture it in language, that separates the cheap copy from the fresh take, the derivative work from the powerful retelling.
Eliot’s kleptomaxim—often smoothed out to “Good artists borrow, great artists steal”—reminds us that artists don’t create something out of nothing, but are forever rehammering old material into new shapes. You can do so with no clear sense of feeling, lifelessly parroting the material of the past, or, with careful eye, attentive ear, and keen emotional sensibility, articulate a “whole of feeling” and shock old ideas to life.
*
Though Eliot’s line is well known, the essay it comes from is less so. In “Philip Massinger,” Eliot explores how the titular Jacobean dramatist drew on Shakespeare yet failed to rival him in richness of expression. Alternating excerpts of their works with observations on how they differ, Eliot shows how Massinger fell victim to tracing, with less vigor, the work of his mighty predecessor.
Massinger: Can I call back yesterday, with all their aids
That bow unto my sceptre? or restore
My mind to that tranquillity and peace
It then enjoyed?
Shakespeare: Not poppy, nor mandragora,
Nor all the drowsy syrops of the world
Shall ever medecine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou owedst yesterday.
*
Eliot was a master burglar himself, his plunder glittering across the barrens of his magnum opus, The Waste Land, with nearly half the work consisting of phrases and imagery pinched from sources ranging from Chaucer to Dante, Baudelaire to the Bible. As Eliot fesses up toward the end of his mixtape, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”
*
Fittingly, Eliot’s dictum on artistic appropriation is not without precursors of its own. In a Gentleman’s Magazine article from 1892 titled “Imitators and Plagiarists,” W.H. Davenport Adams analyzed the ways in which the English poet Tennyson was influenced by his forebears. Noting how the poet “adopts an image or a suggestion from a predecessor, and works it up into his own glittering fabric,” Davenport generalized his findings with the declaration that “great poets imitate and improve, whereas small ones steal and spoil.” Was Eliot’s rendition a blatant rip-off? A stylistic tweak? A mere coincidence? Or, to Eliot’s point, yet another stab at a timeless, ever-evolving idea?*
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Illustration by Liana Finck.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
–Joan Didion, 1979
Bad things happen, and almost immediately, the mind scrambles to make sense of them. Every dark event must be absorbed into a broader narrative, every violent act slotted into a legible worldview. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” writes Joan Didion at the start of her essay “The White Album.” Without them, life is just too scary.
We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five…We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
What happens, then, when our meaning-making powers start to fray? When the ferment is too wild, the events too jarring—the violence, quite literally, too senseless? In the narrative-shattering tumult of late-sixties California, that’s precisely, says Didion, what happened. Jumping haphazardly from the Ferguson brothers’ murder trial, to the shooting of Black Panther Party founder Huey Newton, to the Manson Family slaughter of Sharon Tate and others, to off-kilter episodes from her personal life, Didion’s essay shimmers with the paranoid, hallucinatory glow of the period. Cults, drugs, militants, Scientologists, fired-up revolutionaries and listless rock stars, weird phone calls and random walk-ins, private investigators and conspiratorial trucks—all of it churns in a disorienting, sinister brew. Describing, among other horrors, the story of a five-year-old girl left to die on the median of an interstate, all Didion could conclude was that “these images did not fit into any narrative I knew.”
Her loss of the plot wasn’t just social, either, but personal, as though she had been shocked out of the story of her own life, dislocated from the world until her role in it no longer felt real.
I appeared, on the face of it, a competent enough member of some community or another, a signer of contracts and Air Travel cards, a citizen…This was an adequate enough performance, as improvisations go. The only problem was that my entire education, everything I had ever been told or had told myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised…I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no “meaning” beyond their temporary arrangement.
Didion logged her confusions in writing; they also showed up on the scanner. After a series of visual disturbances and a battery of tests, Didion was given an “exclusionary” diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. The disease would remain in remission for the rest of her life, but the ambiguous and tentative findings were at once distressing and revelatory. “The startling fact was this: my body was offering a precise physiological equivalent to what had been going on in my mind.”
Didion’s reflections on our need to make sense of the senseless, and on the hollowed-out experience of our failure to do so, are a profound anti-narrative of personal and collective crisis. Proliferating ideologies, baffling violence, the loose threads of a rapidly changing world in which “all connections were equally meaningful, and equally senseless”—Didion doesn’t offer solutions to these cognitive jump cuts or paranoid patterns, doesn’t write a soothing script for us all to sing along to. All she does, all anyone honest can do, is keep looking, noticing, jotting down impressions, struggling for sense, putting together pieces of the story.
*
From her essay “The White Album,” originally published in New West magazine in 1979 and released in a volume of essays of the same name later that year. Taking its title from the Beatles’ 1968 LP nickname, the essay nods, otherwise silently, not just to an iconic album of the period, nor even to the emotional blankness evoked by its cover, but to the manically charged music within—and in particular, to the song “Helter Skelter,” which was interpreted by Charles Manson as prophesying an apocalyptic race war that inspired him to commit savage acts of violence such as those perpetrated, at his behest, in the infamous Tate-LaBianca murders. White and black, color and pallor, hidden meanings and meaningless violence—Didion’s title alludes to it all: the appalling incoherence of evil and its emotion-stunting effects; the paranoiac’s excess of connections and the depressive’s vacuum of sense; breakdowns in intelligibility and the need, despite it all, to understand.
*
There’s an easily missed ambiguity to Didion’s observation that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Just as narrative can shatter into senseless fragments and leave us detached, confused, and lost, so too can it harden into the comforting sermon, the militant ideology, the pat moral philosophy, the cult conspiracy. Telling stories may be a vital imperative—something we cannot do without—but cling to them too tightly and they become a delusion and an insulation. Between abyss and ideology, chaos and suspect clarity, Didion deftly walks us through the rich and ambiguous middle, telling the story without preaching the lesson, recording the scene without rounding off its bumps. If we tell ourselves stories in order to live, Didion reminds us that we must also resist easy answers and ready-made interpretations; we must report what we see as truthfully as we can.
We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live was later the title of her book of collected nonfiction, published in 2006.
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Excerpted from Phrased & Confused: The Curious Meanings of Timeless Quotations by Eli Burnstein. Copyright © 2026 by Eli Burnstein. Published and reprinted by permission of Abrams. All rights reserved.
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