ABSTRACT
The meeting with Ogden at which The Meaning of Meaning was conceived on Armistice night, n November I9I8, became Richards' private symbol for intellectual agreement, design, and forward-looking action. He retold the story many times, condensing its features to a given few: joy at the war's end, the quiet after the evening riot, the place "halfway down my little twisting stairs," the interruptions of the bat's-wing gas burner, the two hours around midnight. Even when the location changed in the retelling, the details remained the same, and can be read synecdochically: peaceful withdrawal in the midst of confusion; "halfway" as in agreement; the light flickering in the dark; the stairs, as in transition, with a temporary "landing"; "twisting," the winding turns of argument, the eddying forces-such winding movements become one of the strongest symbols in his poetry. All this against the general background of the Armistice is both "curious," yet precisely "pinpointed," like a dream. That meeting, "another accident," stood for a long series of beginnings. 1 The Foundations of Aesthetics, The Meaning of Meaning, and collaborative projects of the r92os followed, but we also note Richards' lifelong engagement in joint ventures and coauthored books, highly unusual in the humanities. Another beginning was his appointment in the English School at Cambridge, only six months in the future. The analysis of definition led directly towards Ogden's invention of Basic English, on behalf of
which, in the 1930s, Richards himself began a second career in China and America. This change will seem the more prepared for, though no less dramatic, if one understands its momentum deriving from the "starting point." In those years of choice, I9I?-I9, the stairwell meeting stood for commitment to a war-engendered antiwar consciousness and the remolding of culture.
