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Literary Examples of Ni

Domino

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The Jabberwocky - Lewis Carroll

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
He chortled in his joy.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
 

Z Buck McFate

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"Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne."

-Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
from "Breakfast Of Champions"
 

dynamiteninja

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What a great thread. I really enjoyed reading this. Although I'm not sure if Coleridge, or even Carroll have dominant Ni.
 

Thalassa

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Title: How Your Body Works
From: Monty Python's Brand New Papperbok
Transcribed By: Jonathan Partington (JRP1@PHOENIX.CAMBRIDGE.AC.UK)


The human body is indeed a wonderful thing. Its infinitely complex way of
functioning would take a computer, working flat out, day and night, excluding
Bank Holidays and Christmas, 3,971 years to work out. The slightest flicker of
the eyelid, the smallest movement of the big toe, involves such extraordinarily
complex processes that the average man, working flat out, excluding Bank
Holidays and Christmas, but *including* weekends, would take 84,643 light years
to work it out. If you can imagine an Airedale terrier jumping in and out of a
watering can once every 7 minutes for 12 years you have some idea how long that
would take. And that's only one light year.

Even the most simple process that the body can perform -- like paying the
doctor -- would take a piece of asbestos over 9 billion years to work out. If
you can imagine a man at a cocktail party congratulating the hostess on the
avocado dip 40,000 times every second for 2 1/2 hours twice a week for 28,000
years you can begin to realise what an extraordinarily wonderful thing the
human body is.

To put it even more simply, if you can imagine a doctor leaving his lucrative
Harley St. practice to a younger partner, and cruising round the world 4 times
a year, drinking 3 bottles of champagne with a friend's wife every afternoon,
and writing an article on How Your Body Works once every 96 days, you'll get
some idea of why I was struck off the register. Good evening.


I :heart: Monty Python.
 

teslashock

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This is a great thread. I've just now taken the time to read through it. I envy Ni.

"Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses."
-wittgenstein

I don't really understand how this is Ni though. Maybe because it is using a different perspective to see that language is purely a product of man? But it's a metaphor, and I thought analogies and metaphors between two unconnected things was an Ne thing. My mind naturally makes connections like this. You Ni users can't lay claim to the one thing thing we're good at!
 

Thalassa

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This is a great thread. I've just now taken the time to read through it. I envy Ni.



I don't really understand how this is Ni though. Maybe because it is using a different perspective to see that language is purely a product of man? But it's a metaphor, and I thought analogies and metaphors between two unconnected things was an Ne thing. My mind naturally makes connections like this. You Ni users can't lay claim to the one thing thing we're good at!

I'm with you here. :yes:
 

teslashock

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I'm with you here. :yes:

I think it's just an Ne-induced metaphor that appeals to Ni users because of the connection that it makes between language and another man-made product, creating the notion that language is exclusively a part of man; it's just a bunch of bits and pieces that man himself has put together over time to form one congruent whole.

Anyway, continue with your Ni-love! Just don't steal our Ne! You guys are great enough without it. :wubbie:
 

Jaguar

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The Ocean rumbles
cracking the rocks together on shore
confusing the sand.
Lightening splits the water -
The wondering sea, chaotic in beauty, faithless, harassed
Or the loving sea, the one you float on, the one that takes you home.
Poorly veiled and mostly happy
The waves crash with questions
Why do you love?
The mist sweeps the questions back to sea unanswered


Let's see if an ENTP calls this Ne, too.
 

teslashock

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The Ocean rumbles
cracking the rocks together on shore
confusing the sand.
Lightening splits the water -
The wondering sea, chaotic in beauty, faithless, harassed
Or the loving sea, the one you float on, the one that takes you home.
Poorly veiled and mostly happy
The waves crash with questions
Why do you love?
The mist sweeps the questions back to sea unanswered


Let's see if an ENTP calls this Ne, too.

I called one example Ne, and I'm still giving you Ni users a lot of credit. Don't be a ninny.

Let's see if an ENTJ can ever satiate his thirst for power and glory enough to admit that not all brilliance is attributable to Ni/Te.
 

the state i am in

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This is a great thread. I've just now taken the time to read through it. I envy Ni.

I don't really understand how this is Ni though. Maybe because it is using a different perspective to see that language is purely a product of man? But it's a metaphor, and I thought analogies and metaphors between two unconnected things was an Ne thing. My mind naturally makes connections like this. You Ni users can't lay claim to the one thing thing we're good at!

wittgenstein is an infj as they come. we both do the same shit, Ni tends towards immaterial abstraction and Ne tends towards material actualization of abstraction. i think emerson is Ni and whitman is Ne.

if you think these kinds of connections are Ni or Ne, you haven't met the right people yet. also, Ni + Ne is a total fucking revelation, so you should try it some time. very harlem globetrotter-y.

as far as a better explanation, Ni will take an abstract relationship and superimpose it into weird areas. it will challenge you by not converting into like terms, just borrowing relationships from an infinite number of domains no matter how unclear or intelligible and just compile them as they go. Te makes it more obvious, Fe just flows, draping itself in letters and spoken poems. Ne will just scan the environment for a connection that can show something in a more concrete way, whereas we scan our interior for that relationship, so it's less grounded and more radically subjective. with Ne tho, our ideas get picked off, they see where we're going, and we both just play catch with an imaginary baseball, ridiculous diving catches, etc. for us the right thing is whatever invisible mind's eye essentialized relationship rings our relevancy circus bell the hardest.
 

hokie912

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Wow, nebbykoo, I was just about to suggest both Cormac McCarthy and Milan Kundera!

I wish I could find my copy of Kundera's Slowness, which is so Ni it hurts, but the only novel I have on hand is The Farewell Party. I'm tempted to quote an entire chapter, but:

No one could blame Ruzena for being in a bad mood. But why was she so irritated by Olga's refusal to let herself be filmed? Why did she identify herself so totally with the mob of fat women who had welcomed the men's arrival with joyful squeals?

And, by the way, why were those fat women squealing so joyfully? Was it because they wanted to display their beauty to the young men and seduce them?

Surely not. Their conspicuous shamelessness arose precisely from the certainty that they had no seductive beauty at their disposal. They were filled with rancor against youthful women, and hoped by exhibiting their sexually useless bodies to malign and mock female nakedness. They wished to take revenge on and torpedo with the repulsiveness of their bodies the glory of female beauty, for they knew that bodies, whether beautiful or ugly, are ultimately all the same and that the ugly overshadow the beautiful as they whisper to men's ears. Look, this is the truth of the body that bewitches you! Look, this big flabby tit is the same thing as the breast you so madly adore.

The joyful shamelessness of the fat women in the pool was a necrophiliac ring dance around the transience of youth, a ring dance made all the more joyful by the presence in the pool of a young woman to serve as sacrificial victim. When Olga wrapped herself in the sheet they interpreted the gesture as sabotage of their cruel rite, and thus they were furious.

But Ruzena was neither fat nor old, she was actually prettier than Olga! Why then did she show no solidarity with her? ....
-Milan Kundera

And this is a passage from McCarthy's novel The Road, which is one of my favorite books.
He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.
-Cormac McCarthy

And for a less bleak example of Ni in literature, a passage from Jane Austen's deliciously witty first chapter of Northhanger Abbey.
It is now expedient to give some description of Mrs. Allen that the reader may be able to judge in what manner her actions will hereafter tend to promote the general distress of the work, and how she will probably contribute to reduce poor Catherine to all the desperate wretchedness of which a last volume is capable--whether by her imprudence, vulgarity, or jealousy--whether by intercepting her letters, ruining her character, or turning her out of doors.
-Jane Austen

One of the things I found when trying to find succinct examples of introverted intuition in writing is that it's something that's very difficult to distill or quote out of context. A lot of it involves connections with other things that have occurred or been referenced in the novel.
 

Lotr246

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In my opinion, the best expression of Ni from characters in literature comes from James Joyce's Ulysses. Here are Leopold Bloom's thoughts (after the dialogue) during a funeral of one of his friends:

Mr. Kernan said with solemnity:
-I am the resurrection and the life. That touches a man's inmost heart.
-It does, Mr Bloom said.
Your heart perhaps but what price the fellow in the six feet by two with his toes to the daisies? No touching that. Seat of the affections. Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up: and there you are. Lots of them lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead. That last day idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job. Get up! Last day! Then every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the rest of his traps. Find damn all of himself that morning. Pennyweight of powder in a skull. Twelve grammes one pennyweight. Troy measure.
 

Z Buck McFate

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I've had trouble deciding whether I see more Ni or more Ne in Jorge Luis Borges's writing. But this particular chunk seems pretty Ni to me:

A Dialogue About a Dialogue

A: Absorbed in our discussion of immortality, we had let night fall without fighting the lamp, and we couldn’t see each other’s faces. With an offhandedness or gentleness more convincing then passion would have been, Macedonio Fernandez’ voice said once more that the soul is immortal. He assured me that the death of the body is altogether insignificant, and that dying has to be the most unimportant thing that can happen to a man. I was playing with Macedonio’s pocketknife, opening and closing it. A nearby accordion was infinitely dispatching La Comparsita, that dismaying trifle that so many people like because it’s been misrepresented to them as being old. . . I suggested to Macedonio that we kill ourselves, so that we might have our discussion without all that racket.
Z: (mockingly) But I suspect that at the last moment you reconsidered.
A: (now deep in mysticism) Quite frankly, I don’t remember whether we committed suicide that night or not.
 

the state i am in

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I've had trouble deciding whether I see more Ni or more Ne in Jorge Luis Borges's writing. But this particular chunk seems pretty Ni to me:

A Dialogue About a Dialogue

A: Absorbed in our discussion of immortality, we had let night fall without fighting the lamp, and we couldn’t see each other’s faces. With an offhandedness or gentleness more convincing then passion would have been, Macedonio Fernandez’ voice said once more that the soul is immortal. He assured me that the death of the body is altogether insignificant, and that dying has to be the most unimportant thing that can happen to a man. I was playing with Macedonio’s pocketknife, opening and closing it. A nearby accordion was infinitely dispatching La Comparsita, that dismaying trifle that so many people like because it’s been misrepresented to them as being old. . . I suggested to Macedonio that we kill ourselves, so that we might have our discussion without all that racket.
Z: (mockingly) But I suspect that at the last moment you reconsidered.
A: (now deep in mysticism) Quite frankly, I don’t remember whether we committed suicide that night or not.

with borges you have Ne dom whitman translated into spanish, concentrated into Ni, then transmitted to garcia marquez (Ne?). i have theory that magical realism started with whitman's verb tenses. true story. then enter pablo neruda (also enfp like whitman).

also if you look at borges favorite writers, apart from whitman, they're all probable infjs. the catholic infjs on the writer list, etc.
 

Requeim

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