Is it the lumberman, then, who is the friend and lover of the pine, stands nearest to it, and understands its nature best? Is it the tanner who has barked it, or he who has boxed it for turpentine, whom posterity will fable to have been changed into a pine at last? No! no! it is the poet.... All the pines shudder and heave a sigh when that man steps on the forest floor.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
Like propaganda generally, advertising must thus pervade the atmosphere; for it wants, paradoxically, to startle its beholders without really being noticed by them. Its aim is to jolt us, not “into thinking,” as in a Brechtian formulation, but specifically away from thought, into quasiautomatic action: “To us,” as an executive at Coca-Cola puts it, “communication is message assimilation—the respondent must be shown to behave in some way that proves they [sic] have come to accept the message, not merely to have received it.”
—Mark Crispin Miller, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Hipness Unto Death,” Boxed In: The Culture of TV, Northwestern University Press (1988)
Who then is she,
She holding me? The people’s sea drives on her,
Drives out the father from the caesared camp;
The dens of shape
Shape all her whelps with the long voice of water,
That she I have,
The country-handed grave boxed into love....
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)