| Author Quoted | Claude Levi-Strauss |
| Title Quoted | Pensee sauvage |
| Date (Year/Month/Day) | 1967/10/08 |
| Imprint | [S.l.] : [s.n.]. 1962 |
| Quotation | Compared with L.-S., Bachelard is flaccid and uninteresting, except for occasional intuitions. Levi-Strauss is much deeper because he deals in the basic substance of experience and discourse in primitive society - the raw matter and the primitive luxuriance of forms. Bachelard gets at it only in indifferent and recent poetry where the matter has gone thin and everything has long since been worked out of it. But see the magnificent concrete poem - mobile, visual and conceptual of Levi-S. on p. 201 of La Pensee sauvage. And this as a mere model of a great cosmic poem based simply on the duality species-individual. (Imagine it with 2 million species working and an almost infinite number of possible individuals: primitive thought really grappled with the world!) |
| Quotation Source | Learning to love: exploring solitude and freedom. The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume 6, 1966-1967.; Edited by Christine M. Bochen. / [San Francisco] : HarperCollins. 1997, p. 300 |
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| Link to Merton's Copy |
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