why/read
Robert Hass,
James Wood,
William H. Gass,
Jonathan Franzen,
Frank Conroy,
Michel Houellebecq,
Ursula K. Le Guin,
David Foster Wallace,
Carole Maso
Why read?
We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel - or have done and thought and felt; or might do and think and feel - is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become. A person who had never known another human being [...] could not know anything about himself, no matter how long he lived with himself. And a person who had never listened to nor read a tale or myth or parable or story, would remain ignorant of his own emotional and spiritual heights and depths, would not know fully what it is to be human. [...]
I’m fanatically reluctant to say that fiction ought to do one thing rather than another. I do know what I want from fiction. I want it to exhilarate me, to unbind my eyes, to murder and resurrect me, to harm me in some fruitful way. But that said, yes, the journey into intense feeling and the conquest of unknown emotional territory is something fiction can make possible.
steven millhauser
Of course, there’s irony to this, as well, because the whole of Inside is about getting outside, about escaping the facility that is the game you’re playing, and the allegorical game designers seem to be trying to help you do that, even though you’re not actually escaping anything, because it’s all just the game. To escape this—to make it more than a prepubescent meta-snort of postmodernism—you have to broaden your understanding of what escape might mean. If escape means distraction, then Inside fails as art, but if escape means enlarging the boundaries of the self, then it succeeds. In other words, Inside is not about whether the kid, or his sister, is dead or alive at the beginning or the end of the game, it’s about whether you are.
The much remarked-upon narrator of Raymond Carver’s classic short story, “Cathedral,” experiences such a moment as the story climaxes with a blind man helping him draw a church. “My eyes were still closed,” the narrator says. “I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.”
At its most ambitious, Inside aspires to a similar feeling. Escape in art that is not transcendence is cheap, and if you can climb beyond the foolish puzzles and the Easter eggs and the hidden meanings, you can feel, for a moment, that you are not alone on your sofa with your phone, playing a game; rather, you are somewhere else—somewhere grassy, bathed in warmth by a ray of sunlight falling from above.
aw i like this
[...] 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.
I could say to students: if you substitute imagination for love, you have in hand one of Wallace Stevens’s persistent thoughts about the world, and our experience of it, and the nature of knowledge. Bronze then becomes a word to think about, the bronzes of autumnal New England and the sun-gilded bronzes of the tropics. We live, the poem muses, in a bronze décor. And it contains a sort of final palm tree, and a horizon, because in the imagination, which is really no space and no time, there are nevertheless horizons. So one could say that postmodernism has not so much superseded Romanticism in this poem as swallowed it. Probably that bird in the palm with its fire-fangled feathers is the sun seen through palm leaves. It could be the sun coming up or the sun going down; you can’t tell. In the imagination it could be both, and the fact that this was one of his last poems gives this ambiguity another resonance. To notice all this is to put someone’s state of mind—or someone’s construction of the fiction of a state of mind, that of a man who’s worked at poetry his entire life, haunted by the mystery of whether language can get hold of existence at all—to put that poem, its breath, its second thoughts, its strange metaphor, into other people’s possession. Something like this is surely the gift poetry gives us and that, teaching poetry, we give to others.
"Who are my contemporaries?" Juan Gelman asks himself.
Juan says that sometimes he comes across men who smell of fear, in Buenos Aires, Paris, or anywhere in the world, and feels that these men are not his contemporaries. But there is a Chinese who, thousands of years ago, wrote a poem about a goatherd who is far from his beloved, and yet can hear in the middle of the night, in the middle of the snow, the sound of her comb running through her hair. And reading this distant poem, Juan finds that yes, these people - the poet, the goatherd and the woman - are truly his contemporaries.
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
There are moments when prose turns to poetry; when, reading a novel or a story, a sentence acts like a trapdoor you tumble through into a history previously unglimpsed, or (it could be one and the same) the injured textures of your own life. The eye that skims from page to page is swapped out, you feel it has to be, for the ear that listens. After over three hundred pages of realist prose about life in a mid-nineteenth-century Midlands town, Eliot writes a sentence of prose that’s also a line of poetry. As sounds converge (‘grass’ and ‘grow’, ‘hear’ and ‘heart beat’), time itself becomes audible; ‘silence’ itself sings, rhyming with ‘like’, ‘die’, ‘lies’ and ‘side’. Reading this passage by a Victorian novelist, I’m once again with my mother at the end of that pier in Greece, past nightfall – listening, listening.