"Statistics"
by Marianne Moore, almost
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers that there is in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful; when they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible, the
same thing may be said for all of us--that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand. The bat,
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse
that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the poet--case after case
could be cited did
one wish it; nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents and
school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must
make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half statisticians,
the result is not statistics,
nor till the autocrats among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination”--above
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, imaginary gardens with real data in them,
shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance
of their opinion--
the raw material of statistics in
all its rawness, and
that which is on the other hand,
genuine, then you are interested in statistics.
Original here.
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