Excpert from Gertrude Stein's Composition as Explanation

Composition as Explanation

Gertrude Stein

First delivered by the author as a lecture at Cambridge and Oxford, this essay was first published by the

Hogarth Press in London in 1926 and revived in the volume called What Are Masterpieces.

Beginning again and again is a natural thing even when there is a series.

Beginning again and again and again explaining composition and time is a natural thing.

It is understood by this time that everything is the same except composition and time, composition and the time of

the composition and the time in the composition.

Everything is the same except composition and as the composition is different and always going to be different

everything is not the same. Everything is not the same as the time when of the composition and the time in the

composition is different. The composition is different, that is certain.

The composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the

composition that at the time they are living in the composition of the time in which they are living. It is that that

makes living a thing they are doing. Nothing else is different, of that almost any one can be certain. The time when

and the time of and the time in that composition is the natural phenomena of that composition and of that perhaps

every one can be certain.

No one thinks these things when they are making when they are creating what is the composition, naturally no one

thinks, that is no one formulates until what is to be formulated has been made.

Composition is not there, it is going to be there and we are here. This is some time ago for us naturally.

The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody

is doing everything. This makes the thing we are looking at very different and this makes what those who describe it

make of it, it makes a composition, it confuses, it shows, it is, it looks, it likes it as it is, and this makes what is seen

as it is seen. Nothing changes from generation to generation except the thing seen and that makes a composition.

http://grace.evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/literature/stein2/stein2.pdf