Chapter 1 - Gertrude Stein for anyone

Summary

In The Geographical History of America, or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind (1937), Gertrude Stein describes the effect of flying over the United States and looking at the land from above, which she distinguishes from what happens when you “climb on the land”:

When you climb on the land high human nature knows because by remembering it has been a dangerous thing to go higher and higher on the land which is where human nature was but now in an aeroplane human nature is nothing remembering is nothing no matter how many have been killed from up there it is not anything that is a memory…

And so the human mind is like not being in danger but being killed, there is no remembering, no there is no remembering and no forgetting because you have to remember to forget no there is none in any human mind.

What does Stein mean by the “human mind” if it involves no remembering or forgetting (faculties most of us would tend to associate with nothing if not our minds)? The best way to make sense of this counterintuitive definition is to look at what else Stein aligns with the “human mind” in opposition to what she calls “human nature.” She adds to the distinction between climbing on the land and looking at it from above in another passage when she remarks that “the land is flat from on high.”