Involute
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An involute is a term used by Thomas De Quincey to denote (according to Frank Kermode) "a recurring complex of ideas". De Quincey borrowed the term from conchology.
The term is first found in Suspiria de Profundis[1] (1845):
- "far more of our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through perplexed combinations of concrete objects, pass to us as involutes (if I may coin that word) in compound experiences incapable of being disentangled, than ever reach us directly, and in their own abstract shapes."
The 'involute' De Quincey refers to in this case was an illustrated Bible which he and his sisters were fascinated by when they were children.
In a later essay, "Infant Literature" (1853), collected in Autobiographical Sketches[2], De Quincey would return to the involutes:
- "I could not understand. It was, in fact, one of those many important cases which elsewhere I have called involutes of human sensibility; combinations in which the materials of future thought or feeling are carried as imperceptibly into the mind as vegetable seeds are carried in various states of combination through the atmosphere, or by means of rivers, into remote countries."
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