Quoting and Paraphrasing

We quote to reproduce a source exactly and to provide the tonal core of the source’s voice or the impact of its expressive power. We paraphrase to restate that voice, that expression, in our own words, avoiding thereby the distracting iteration of quotations or the charge that we have done little more than create a string of prose beaded by someone else’s words. Most composition textbooks emphasize paraphrase and advise writers to quote sparingly. The original, the direct, is erased, to be replaced by the writer’s restatement of the original.

There are two related problems with paraphrasing. First, it is a translation, and translations never capture the original in its full integrity. The second problem lies in what Walker Percy calls “the symbolic complex,” a preformulated perception whose value lies only in the degree to which what is perceived approximates the preformulation. The danger, in short, is that paraphrase can blunt or distort the original, can chamfer or curtain its difference, can even render it mute.

I’d like to think that when we look at the things around us, when we gaze at and regard the phenomena that environ us, we have the choice to quote them or paraphrase them, to open ourselves directly to them or cast them into our own language.

My neighbor has counted every tree on his property and catalogued them by species, as if their sole value lies in their number and diversity. He has inventoried his trees, itemized and columned them in a mental ledger. They do not stand individually before him, are not palpably real and living things, have no secrets. They testify, rather, to the accumulated extent of what he owns, and in that extent he finds self-satisfaction. He does not know and, judging by his reaction to my mentioning it, is incurious about the cultural history of his trees. He does not know that oaks have been immemorially associated with strength and courage, that Socrates called oaks oracle trees, that a poultice made of oak leaves can be used to heal wounds. He does not know that maples represent balance and practicality, that elms emblemize intuition and mental strength, that lindens betoken purity and truth. No, my neighbor has paraphrased his trees, made them images of what he holds within the bounded lines he occupies. He has, in effect, made them images of himself.

I believe trees have a capacity for expression. I’d even say trees can, after a fashion, talk. As cultural ecologist David Abram asserts, trees “can seem to speak to us when they are jostled by the wind,” the “different forms of foliage,” those leafy tongues, lending them “a distinctive voice,” a particular dialect. “To be sure,” Abram says, they “do not speak in words. But neither do humans speak only in words.” Beyond the verbal, we employ, to a much larger extent than we realize, the language of bodily gesture, of pitch and tone and cadence. Linguistically, we share an affinity with trees.

If trees can talk, they can be quoted, directly. Here is what my trees say to me: “Renew yourself each year without fail; be a shading comfort and a nesting home for others; send the branches of yourself outward and upward, and in the winter, let them arch like cursive strokes across the leaden sky; let your living days ring you around and make you wise, and if not wise, then stoic, imperturbable; feel that you are deep-rooted and can withstand the beleaguering bluster of the fiercest gale; refuse to be hijacked by pieces of time; know that, like me, you cannot be shawled by your physical qualities, that you are something more, something implicit, something ineffable and undistilled; and know that that something can be listened to.” And I quote.