why/read
Robert Hass,
James Wood,
William H. Gass,
Annie Dillard,
Jonathan Franzen,
Frank Conroy,
Michel Houellebecq,
Ursula K. Le Guin,
Liv Ullmann
Why read?
[...] Whosoever has let in one genuine sentence, one paragraph, has felt that seduction like a golden thread being pulled slowly through one. . . .
'I know, but...' Once more Lambert paused, seemed embarrassed. 'For example, your series on Portugal is very good, but I remember those pages you once wrote on Sicily, It makes you feel a little sad not to find anything like them in what you're writing now.'
'If you ever go to Portugal, you won't feel very much like describing pomegranates in bloom,' Henri said.
'I wish you'd feel that way again,' Lambert said urgently. 'Why not? You certainly have the right to stroll along the seaside without worrying about the price of sardines.'
'But the fact is that I couldn't,' Henri replied.
'After all,' Lambert continued vehemently, 'we fought in the Resistance to defend the individual, to defend his right to be himself and to be happy. It's time now to reap what we sowed.'
'The trouble is that there are several hundred million individuals for whom that right still doesn't exist,' Henri said, shrugging his shoulders. 'I think it's precisely because we began to take notice of them that we can no longer stop.'
'Then everybody has to wait for the whole world to be happy before trying to be happy?' Lambert said. 'And art and literature must be put off until that golden age? It's now, right now, that we need them!'
aaaahhhh
Fiction is a record of what has never happened and yet absolutely happened, and those of us who read it regularly have been changed and challenged and broken down a thousand times over by those nothings, changed by people who never existed doing things that no one quite did, changed by characters that don’t entirely exist and the feelings and thoughts that never exactly passed through them.
What do writers do when they seriously notice the world? Perhaps they do nothing less than rescue the life of things from their death--from two deaths, one small and one large: from the 'death' which literary form always threatens to impose on life, and from actual death. Which is to say, they rescue us from our death. I mean the fading reality that besets details as they recede from us--the memories of our childhood, the almost-forgotten pungency of flavours, smells, textures: the slow death that we deal to the world by the sleep of our attention. [...]
Well, it does educate us about life. I wouldn’t be the person I am, I wouldn’t understand what I understand, were it not for certain books. I’m thinking of the great question of nineteenth-century Russian literature: how should one live? A novel worth reading is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.
whether the purpose of literature is to educate us about life
[...] The Recognitions needed devotees who would keep its existence known until such time as it could be accepted as a classic; but a cult following is not the finest one to have, suggesting something, at best, beloved only by special tastes—in this case, the worry was, a wacko book with wacko fans. In fact, a cult did form, a cult in the best old sense, for it was made of readers whose consciousness had been altered by their encounter with this book; who had experienced more than its obvious artistic excellence, and responded to its neglect not merely with the resigned outrage customarily felt by those who read well and widely and wish that justice be accorded good books; it was composed of those who had felt to the centers of themselves how much this novel was indeed a recognition and could produce that famous shock: how it revealed the inner workings of the social world as though that world were a nickel watch; how it combined the pessimisms of its perceptions with the affirmations of the art it, at the same time, altered and advanced; more, how its author, though new to the game, had cared enough about himself, his aims, his skill, to create greatness against the grain, and, of course, against the odds.
Silence became his mode, exile (in effect) his status, cunning in scraping by his strategy, while compiling data and constructing other people’s niggling or nefarious plots, building another long book out of our business world’s obsession with money, manipulation, and deception, composing a hymn to Horatio Alger, music made of inane, conniving, sly, deceitful speech. J R did ok at the store for a time, and gathered in the National Book Award, but I think it was less read than The Recognitions, less enjoyed, and could not produce, of course, the same surprise. Furthermore, although clearly created by a similar sensibility, and expressing a common point of view, J R was as different from the earlier novel as Joyce from James. But do not put down what you have to go to J R yet, even if it is almost as musical as Finnegans Wake, a torrent of talk and Tower of Babble, a slumgullion of broken phrases and incomplete—let’s call them—thoughts; because there is plenty to listen to here; because we must always listen to the language; it is our first sign of the presence of a master’s hand; and when we do that, when we listen, it is because we have first pronounced the words and performed the text, so when we listen we hear, hear ourselves singing the saying, and now we are real readers, we are participating in the making, we are moving the tune along the line, because no one who loves literature can follow these motions, these sentences, half sentences, of William Gaddis, very far without halting and holding up their arms and outcrying hallelujah there is something good in this gosh awful god empty world.
Which is almost the whole point of what we do.
AHH
[...] It was she who produced the white Vintage paperback volume of Wallace Stevens at some point in the drive and suggested that we take turns reading the stanzas of “Sea Surface Full of Clouds.” I was stunned by the poem. I am still stunned by the poem. After we had read around and gotten over the shock and novelty of the way the adjectives play over and transform the surface of the poem, and after we had read a few others by Stevens, and other books were produced and other poems read, the conversation moved on, but I got my hands on Marie’s Stevens and when we arrived in Carmel and got some more wine and watched the sun set over Carmel Bay in a light rain, I suggested we read the poem again, which we did, to humor me, I think, while the last light smoldered on the horizon. Then we tried to build a fire on the beach, but the rain turned into a lashing Pacific storm and we spent the night, quite wet, eight of us crammed into the car in the parking lot, laughing a lot—it was very sexy as I remember—and making jokes about cars and autoeroticism. I will start to feel like Kinbote, the lunatic annotator of other people’s poems with incidents from his own life in Nabokov’s Pale Fire, if I tell you the story of the lives of each of the people in the car. Marie, who returned to the Philippines and who, I know, had two children and whose spine was badly injured when she was struck by a car; Killpack, who did go to Vietnam and then army intelligence toward the end of the war and after that seemed to disappear from sight; another friend who was a classics major and later managed a café and wrote poems and died of cancer a couple of years ago; but I will resist except to say that the poem stays with me, in the way that songs we fall in love to stay with us, as a figure for that time and those people, and their different lives will always feel to me as if they are playing out in time the way the adjectives of experience play over the adamant nouns in Stevens’s poem: rosy chocolate and chophouse chocolate and musky chocolate, perplexed and tense and tranced machine.
ahhhh i love this
What the poem does, in fact, is one of the things art has the power to do. It refreshes our sense of ordinary life, and—in this case—our sense that there are lives other than our own and that people with hopes and dreams and desires are going about them as we are going about ours. Boris Eichenbaum, the Russian formalist critic, has said that “the function of art is to make the grass grass and the stone stone, by freeing us from the automatism of perception.” It may be that the small power of the literary arts to make some contribution to resisting the violence of princes, and of the human heart that princes like George Bush symbolize, lies here.
on a poem by Ko Un in Ten Thousand Lives
[...] I remember an experience of standing in the library in my freshmen year of college and picking up T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and reading in it and feeling complete incomprehension and a desire to be able to comprehend it or to find someone who could explain it to me, open it up for me, so intense it felt like physical nausea. Even though I didn’t know what it was that I thought was in that poem. Not so much “life,” perhaps, but knowledge of it and its great mysteries, love and sex and death and the amorphous and puzzling self and the meanings of suffering and injustice and the nature of things. Drawn to poetry by these strong but somewhat undefinable impulses, also perhaps by the fact that putting words down on paper and composing phrases in my mind seemed like something I could actually do, I came to the writing of poetry and the reading of poetry at more or less the same time, and I took to it, entered its territory more or less poem by poem, as this or that poem—lifeless words on a page—came alive for me. So it was very much my impulse in the teaching of poetry to pass on to my students in the classroom that experience, and so teaching poetry for me has been mostly about reflecting on what makes particular poems come alive to me and trying to convey that experience to others.