On the unseen environment, Mexico, the European war,
our grip is slight though our feeling may be intense. The original
pictures and words which aroused it have not anything like the force
of the feeling itself. The account of what has happened out of sight
and hearing in a place where we have never been, has not and never can
have, except briefly as in a dream or fantasy, all the dimensions of
reality. But it can arouse all, and sometimes even more emotion than
the reality. For the trigger can be pulled by more than one stimulus.
The stimulus which originally pulled the trigger may have been a
series of pictures in the mind aroused by printed or spoken words.
These pictures fade and are hard to keep steady; their contours and
their pulse fluctuate. Gradually the process sets in of knowing what
you feel without being entirely certain why you feel it. The fading
pictures are displaced by other pictures, and then by names or
symbols. But the emotion goes on, capable now of being aroused by the
substituted images and names. Even in severe thinking these
substitutions take place, for if a man is trying to compare two
complicated situations, he soon finds exhausting the attempt to hold
both fully in mind in all their detail. He employs a shorthand of
names and signs and samples. He has to do this if he is to advance at
all, because he cannot carry the whole baggage in every phrase through
every step he takes.
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