There is a wonderful, densely stunning essay called "The Nature of Knowledge in Short Fiction," in which the author, Charles May, discusses what formal characteristics all stories, short stories, and novels take in principal, according to many scholars. Among the really interesting sections, May discusses that storytelling "does not spring from one's encounter with the everyday world, but rather from one's encounter with the sacred (in which true reality is revealed in all of its plentitude) or with the absurd (in which true reality is reality is revealed in all of its vacuity)." So we can see the audience-pleasing joy of reading the former type, but what about the latter? Why read (or write) stories that reveal what is bleak?
May goes on to quote the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács, who says that absurdity in the short story is seen "undisguised and unadorned...and the exorcising power of this view, without fear or hope, gives it consecration of form; meaninglessness...becomes eternal because it is affirmed, transcended and redeemed by form."
Pause for a breath.
As I take it, if a dark story achieves truth, it has achieved meaning. As Arthur Miller said, "attention must be paid" to such dark characters (e.g. Willy Loman) and dark stories because truth is told - and truth binds us all, even if it is a truth that is difficult.
On a somewhat happier note, May's essay also discusses a concept by another philosopher and writer, Mircea Eliade: "Any aspect of experience, no matter how commonplace, can be come sacred..." May quotes Eliade's idea of "the paradox of hierophany": "By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else..."
A lot of fancy words here, massive philosophical name-dropping as well as "deep thoughts" for a Thursday, but I guess, George, what you and all writers do is show us the truly sacred meaning of this existence, wherever it appears. That all of this life is worth thinking about, and all of it has value. And that work, to me, is heroic.
I loved this particular line: "What is it we hope to have made, when all is said and done, and why does that thing have value?"
In fact, I loved the entire piece, George.
I tend to be an optimist, and sometimes, it feels like I have to put a LOT of effort into remaining one. But, I once received a piece of advice that I now have taped to the edge of my computer monitor. It says: "Whenever something doesn't work out the way you thought it would, instead of thinking that something went wrong, see it as something that went unexpectedly well, but for reasons that are not yet apparent. Everything plays in your favor."
A young boy who has been bullied by his parents into following an unrealistic and abusive set of rules and constraints sees his young neighbor in terrible danger, agonizes over what he could do to help, and finds within himself the bravery to break the rules and rescue her in a wonderfully spectacular way.
Sound familiar?
The reader reaches within, fishes around for some bravery, and knows that it will be there when required, whenever that may be.
"Why does that thing have value?"
Does the value of "that thing" depend 100% on the reader's response?
Of course not. The response is extra. Un-looked for. If it were looked for, the story would be worthless.
What is the job of the writer of stories? Is it to be neither optimistic or pessimistic? I don’t think so. I think the job is to write, from one’s place in the world, from one’s heart and mind. Sometimes, that work is going to be pessimistic! And if so, the writer can certainly sit with that a while and decide if that’s what they want to put out into the world. Sometimes we may need a little pessimism in order to be honest. Personally, I like hope at the end of my stories, but that’s my world view. I’m a hopeful person, despite all the evidence out there that we are fucked.
George writes: “art is an offering of sorts – a hypothesis for both writer and reader to take up and consider together.” And I think that is true. We’ve all heard “only connect,” and so we’re all familiar with the idea of connecting through art. But does that have to mean that you’re only doing it right if “the reader will feel she has a friend, in the story and its writer”? Art is more than an offering. Art is a personal explanation and a declaration. Art says “I exist.” George asks “What, ultimately, is the purpose of art?” And later says that one of the goals of his own art is to praise that which should be praised. And I think that’s a great goal. But art can also condemn (I know you all know this) and confuse and throw up its hands and cry and scream and shock and laugh way too hard. Art starts with a maker, a creator. And that creator has their own reasons for creating. It might be because if the artist doesn’t throw paint on that wall their insides may die. But once that paint is thrown—well, then, the viewer has to decide what it is and what it means. Art is a mystery. Art is the opposite of fear. Art is the great savior of all of us. It doesn’t have to be celebratory. It doesn’t have to be optimistic or pessimistic, or not optimistic or not pessimistic, but it certainly can be. It just has to honest. That’s the whole thing.
This is my favourite post of yours to date, George, because it brings us towards an issue that lurks underneath Story Club, I think, and also the entire literary project: niceness.
I read a good number of spiritual books -- Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, that kind of thing. It's good for me (or 'me', as those schools would have it). I admire the writers. But even if I was spiritually well enough to write such books (I'm not) I wouldn't want to do so -- because they're *too performatively healthy*. Too well. Too nice. For my fallen tastes, too often there's a feeling of preaching to the converted, of relatively healthy minds conversing with other relatively healthy minds, a feeling that, as I see it, also frequently haunts the lit fiction world. Too many Zadie Smiths, not enough Dostoevskys (I like Zadie Smith, but still).
I was in a grumpy mood last night after finishing work and felt like slumming it for a bit. I thought about watching a film but then thought instead, "No, let's read some Ellroy." Don't want to offend any Ellroy fans here, or Ellroy himself, but I've never thought of the man as a particularly nice person. I suspect he's not especially spiritually evolved (his memoirs suggest not). But Christ, he can *write* and enthrall me even (or especially) when I'm not really in the mood for reading fiction. That's the kind of book I'd like to write.
My point: one reason for lit fiction becoming culturally peripheral may be that its high-profile practioners appear to becoming nicer and nicer, while the culture as a whole continues to darken. Performatively nice fiction has little to no shot at universality (neither has performatively transgressive fiction) and therefore little chance of attracting to the form that vast percentage of the population who proudly never touch a work of fiction, never mind literary fiction. I worked for years as a nightguard, and a word used by some of my colleagues about lit fiction was 'twee'. And I really had no way of disputing that.
Now, as everybody knows, you George are pretty much the anti-Ellroy. You are clearly a lovely guy, and the way you treat everyone in these threads is yet another example of this. You know redemptive, despair-defeating facts about human life and I want to hear them. I'll read anything you publish and enjoy it. That's why I'm here.
But at the same time I would also kill to read a George Saunders novel that, even just occasionally, has me wondering about your state of mind.
What you described, a level-headed and joyful writer, there is no greater example to me than the unparalleled Marilynne Robinson, who I place firmly on the Mt. Rushmore of American writers for exactly these reasons. Recommend anyone who hasn't read her works run (don't walk) to the nearest book store and pick up "Gilead" or "Jack," and let your world change altogether.
I liked the noodling in this post. I prefer ca-noodling, of course, but one must make do.
The post made me think of an anthropology professor I liked so much that I took several courses he taught. On the first day of each of these courses, the teacher entered after the students were seated. He wore faded, threadbare jeans and a western shirt of some kind. It wasn't a costume either. He just dressed that way. This teacher would then go to an old record player situated on a stool. He would plug the record player in and remove a 45-record from its sleeve. Without introduction, he let the needle drop on a Hank Williams tune. The teacher looked enraptured as the record played, and I believe he was. Enraptured, that is.
When he finally spoke, he mentioned his name and the fact that he was born and raised in Paris. Then he'd smile and drawl, "Paris, Texas."
He'd go on to explain how anthropology is an inquiry into what he called "the human secret;" that is, what makes us who we are? What separates humans from other perfectly good species? He thought country music—the old kind—came closer to answering the question than anything else. It was a good hanger on which to drape his teaching. But I think he believed it too.
Back to George's noodling on the essence, meaning, and purpose of art. Maybe the answers have something to do with that "human secret" notion.
"But mostly I am thinking of that feeling I got while watching it, which was the feeling of being lovingly comforted. That’s a feeling I’d like to give my future readers."
And that is exactly the feeling you give!! Every email from Story Club is like finding a giant hug in my inbox.
So there's no such thing as being "behind," but I am terribly behind with "My First Goose." Have been hosting family for the past few weeks and am now finally enjoying a bit of stillness where I get to rewind a bit and "catch up." What a blessing to be able to fill that stillness with your words.
OMG I wrote a story. This sounds like an odd thing to say in a group of writers, but it’s a big moment for me. I have not written a short story since I was in college. I was headed for a completely different academic track at that time, and then life intervened — marriage, kids including a special-needs child, graduate school, career — and now I am thinking about writing again. I realized I couldn’t follow George’s instruction to juxtapose any of my own works because I can’t even find any of those first stories (they are not gone, and someday I will find them). So I decided I was going to just get started. And I did! It’s not a great story, but it’s my own story and I’m … fond of it. It makes me happy even though I plan to revise it many times. And now I have a start. Buckling my seatbelt and really grateful for this ride.
"At a tender moment, the reader will feel she has a friend, in the story and its writer, even if that writer is long dead or from some faraway place. " After reading (and watching) your post, George, I thought immediately of “The Turkey Season” by Alice Munro. In 1983, I spent a week in my college Infirmary with assorted afflictions, surrounded by other sick young people in assigned beds. It was a depressing, silent place of suspended life. My mother sent me Munro’s collection "Moons of Jupiter" to read while I was there. When I read “Turkey Season,” –in which a young girl learns how to gut turkey carcasses in the killing barn, where bird-bodies hang upside down and limp—I had that true “feeling of being lovingly comforted.” By Munro, by my mother, and by the girl in the story who sings as she walks out of the barn of bodies into the snow. Munro’s "fundamental faith in humanity" turned the Infirmary into a memorable and even beautiful place. It was the first time a story ever befriended me in quite that way you describe, and yes, it did make all the difference.
There is no one for whom the world exists separate from all of us who experience it in relation to one another. So when we reflect life back to itself, we're not expressing some outside objective truth, because that outside truth does not exist (or if it does, it's not something that has relevance to us). But at the same time, there is always more outside of our own perspective than we can grasp. So the goal is neither one perspective, nor some objective, perspective-less state, but rather a confluence, a multiplicity of perspectives.
In writing, when we inhabit that intention-less state, we remain open to all those different ways of seeing. And in reading, we experience someone else's openness. A second-order multiplicity! (And then many people discussing a work together becomes a third-order multiplicity, and so on...)
By seeing things from many different angles, we can start to get a glimpse of that deeper truth that lies beneath all the seeming randomness of events. Things don't just happen arbitrarily. Everything is ultimately a result of many different factors coming together. And there are tendencies, patterns, in the ways these factors come together. So by comparing and contrasting many perspectives, we see what remains, what is eternal. And when we create art, we are creating an interpretation of the world that highlights those patterns and tendencies, that brings them to the fore.
And if the world is ultimately unfolding in certain patterns and tendencies (i.e. not static), then art teaches us not to know the world statically but to understand all the ways things might unfold in the future. We increasingly understand that the deeper truth of the world also includes all the ways the world *might be*.
"Nearly all of us have felt, at least in childhood, that if we imagine that a thing is so, it therefore either is so or can be made to become so. All of us have to learn that this almost never happens, or happens only in very limited ways; but the visionary, like the child, continues to believe that it always ought to happen. We are so possessed with the idea of the duty of acceptance that we are inclined to forget our mental birthright, and prudent and sensible people encourage us in this. That is why Blake is so full of aphorisms like 'If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.' Such wisdom is based on the fact that imagination creates reality, and as desire is a part of imagination, the world we desire is more real than the world we passively accept." (Northrop Frye)
It's striking to me that there is no villain. The sources of trouble are all innocent in their intentions. That plus the audience's being afraid on Chaplin's behalf led to a welling up in me of the heartening feeling/notion that we are all of us in this thing together.
As a lit nerd in high school, I made myself a T-shirt with this Moby-Dick quote:
"It's a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians."
‘[I]f a story really is “an export of one human mind,” if it is really (just) a “psychological projection” – why should my story have any value or relevance to you?’
This is a really interesting question. I think there’s something about encountering another person’s imaginative take on the world that can prompt us to attend more closely to that world, to see it more clearly ourselves. I think very often we fall into habits of thought, ways of thinking about or seeing the world which may present themselves as objective but are often shot-through with our anxieties, biases, self-concern, and so on. But encountering the creativity of another consciousness can reawaken our own creative thinking and shake us out of the old habits of thought. And I think that experience can be very pleasing. It can feel to some extent like a kind of reintroduction to the world, a rediscovery of wonder--which it is.
I’m not sure what it is about human beings that explains why imagination and creativity can be such effective routes to truth, but I’m happy it is that way.
Processing this for later but just wanted to say something about your reaction to watching Chaplin's "The Circus". You wrote "I experience this as just pure joy, the exquisite exploitation of a premise, that has the effect of showing us, really showing us, how we are, how we behave, how we think. And the result is something like love, or maybe the kind of love God must feel for us."
This could have described my reaction to reading/listening to "Victory Lap" (as read by you, the author). It was for me during a low moment in a conga line of low moments, that I turned to Alexa, the only housemate I have who can hear (sadly, the pug is now deaf) and asked her to replay "The Tenth of December".
Hearing and re-reading "Victory Lap" filled me with unbridled joy -- just lifted my mood. I listened again in my car on an errand and when I got out, I found myself standing in a parking lot smiling -- no laughing -- to myself. In public. I don't mean this to be the blowing-smoke-up-the-author's-ass post but a confirmation that art has this power you ascribe it. There is a simple, life-affirmation in the best of it. Which says, "you are not alone, friend. You are never alone."
There is a wonderful, densely stunning essay called "The Nature of Knowledge in Short Fiction," in which the author, Charles May, discusses what formal characteristics all stories, short stories, and novels take in principal, according to many scholars. Among the really interesting sections, May discusses that storytelling "does not spring from one's encounter with the everyday world, but rather from one's encounter with the sacred (in which true reality is revealed in all of its plentitude) or with the absurd (in which true reality is reality is revealed in all of its vacuity)." So we can see the audience-pleasing joy of reading the former type, but what about the latter? Why read (or write) stories that reveal what is bleak?
May goes on to quote the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács, who says that absurdity in the short story is seen "undisguised and unadorned...and the exorcising power of this view, without fear or hope, gives it consecration of form; meaninglessness...becomes eternal because it is affirmed, transcended and redeemed by form."
Pause for a breath.
As I take it, if a dark story achieves truth, it has achieved meaning. As Arthur Miller said, "attention must be paid" to such dark characters (e.g. Willy Loman) and dark stories because truth is told - and truth binds us all, even if it is a truth that is difficult.
On a somewhat happier note, May's essay also discusses a concept by another philosopher and writer, Mircea Eliade: "Any aspect of experience, no matter how commonplace, can be come sacred..." May quotes Eliade's idea of "the paradox of hierophany": "By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else..."
A lot of fancy words here, massive philosophical name-dropping as well as "deep thoughts" for a Thursday, but I guess, George, what you and all writers do is show us the truly sacred meaning of this existence, wherever it appears. That all of this life is worth thinking about, and all of it has value. And that work, to me, is heroic.
I loved this particular line: "What is it we hope to have made, when all is said and done, and why does that thing have value?"
In fact, I loved the entire piece, George.
I tend to be an optimist, and sometimes, it feels like I have to put a LOT of effort into remaining one. But, I once received a piece of advice that I now have taped to the edge of my computer monitor. It says: "Whenever something doesn't work out the way you thought it would, instead of thinking that something went wrong, see it as something that went unexpectedly well, but for reasons that are not yet apparent. Everything plays in your favor."
And that keeps me going.
A young boy who has been bullied by his parents into following an unrealistic and abusive set of rules and constraints sees his young neighbor in terrible danger, agonizes over what he could do to help, and finds within himself the bravery to break the rules and rescue her in a wonderfully spectacular way.
Sound familiar?
The reader reaches within, fishes around for some bravery, and knows that it will be there when required, whenever that may be.
"Why does that thing have value?"
Does the value of "that thing" depend 100% on the reader's response?
Of course not. The response is extra. Un-looked for. If it were looked for, the story would be worthless.
What is the job of the writer of stories? Is it to be neither optimistic or pessimistic? I don’t think so. I think the job is to write, from one’s place in the world, from one’s heart and mind. Sometimes, that work is going to be pessimistic! And if so, the writer can certainly sit with that a while and decide if that’s what they want to put out into the world. Sometimes we may need a little pessimism in order to be honest. Personally, I like hope at the end of my stories, but that’s my world view. I’m a hopeful person, despite all the evidence out there that we are fucked.
George writes: “art is an offering of sorts – a hypothesis for both writer and reader to take up and consider together.” And I think that is true. We’ve all heard “only connect,” and so we’re all familiar with the idea of connecting through art. But does that have to mean that you’re only doing it right if “the reader will feel she has a friend, in the story and its writer”? Art is more than an offering. Art is a personal explanation and a declaration. Art says “I exist.” George asks “What, ultimately, is the purpose of art?” And later says that one of the goals of his own art is to praise that which should be praised. And I think that’s a great goal. But art can also condemn (I know you all know this) and confuse and throw up its hands and cry and scream and shock and laugh way too hard. Art starts with a maker, a creator. And that creator has their own reasons for creating. It might be because if the artist doesn’t throw paint on that wall their insides may die. But once that paint is thrown—well, then, the viewer has to decide what it is and what it means. Art is a mystery. Art is the opposite of fear. Art is the great savior of all of us. It doesn’t have to be celebratory. It doesn’t have to be optimistic or pessimistic, or not optimistic or not pessimistic, but it certainly can be. It just has to honest. That’s the whole thing.
"Art is a lie that tells the truth..." - Picasso
This is my favourite post of yours to date, George, because it brings us towards an issue that lurks underneath Story Club, I think, and also the entire literary project: niceness.
I read a good number of spiritual books -- Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, that kind of thing. It's good for me (or 'me', as those schools would have it). I admire the writers. But even if I was spiritually well enough to write such books (I'm not) I wouldn't want to do so -- because they're *too performatively healthy*. Too well. Too nice. For my fallen tastes, too often there's a feeling of preaching to the converted, of relatively healthy minds conversing with other relatively healthy minds, a feeling that, as I see it, also frequently haunts the lit fiction world. Too many Zadie Smiths, not enough Dostoevskys (I like Zadie Smith, but still).
I was in a grumpy mood last night after finishing work and felt like slumming it for a bit. I thought about watching a film but then thought instead, "No, let's read some Ellroy." Don't want to offend any Ellroy fans here, or Ellroy himself, but I've never thought of the man as a particularly nice person. I suspect he's not especially spiritually evolved (his memoirs suggest not). But Christ, he can *write* and enthrall me even (or especially) when I'm not really in the mood for reading fiction. That's the kind of book I'd like to write.
My point: one reason for lit fiction becoming culturally peripheral may be that its high-profile practioners appear to becoming nicer and nicer, while the culture as a whole continues to darken. Performatively nice fiction has little to no shot at universality (neither has performatively transgressive fiction) and therefore little chance of attracting to the form that vast percentage of the population who proudly never touch a work of fiction, never mind literary fiction. I worked for years as a nightguard, and a word used by some of my colleagues about lit fiction was 'twee'. And I really had no way of disputing that.
Now, as everybody knows, you George are pretty much the anti-Ellroy. You are clearly a lovely guy, and the way you treat everyone in these threads is yet another example of this. You know redemptive, despair-defeating facts about human life and I want to hear them. I'll read anything you publish and enjoy it. That's why I'm here.
But at the same time I would also kill to read a George Saunders novel that, even just occasionally, has me wondering about your state of mind.
When we write, I try to remember two words: "Only connect." (epigraph to E.M. Forster's Howards End.)
What you described, a level-headed and joyful writer, there is no greater example to me than the unparalleled Marilynne Robinson, who I place firmly on the Mt. Rushmore of American writers for exactly these reasons. Recommend anyone who hasn't read her works run (don't walk) to the nearest book store and pick up "Gilead" or "Jack," and let your world change altogether.
I liked the noodling in this post. I prefer ca-noodling, of course, but one must make do.
The post made me think of an anthropology professor I liked so much that I took several courses he taught. On the first day of each of these courses, the teacher entered after the students were seated. He wore faded, threadbare jeans and a western shirt of some kind. It wasn't a costume either. He just dressed that way. This teacher would then go to an old record player situated on a stool. He would plug the record player in and remove a 45-record from its sleeve. Without introduction, he let the needle drop on a Hank Williams tune. The teacher looked enraptured as the record played, and I believe he was. Enraptured, that is.
When he finally spoke, he mentioned his name and the fact that he was born and raised in Paris. Then he'd smile and drawl, "Paris, Texas."
He'd go on to explain how anthropology is an inquiry into what he called "the human secret;" that is, what makes us who we are? What separates humans from other perfectly good species? He thought country music—the old kind—came closer to answering the question than anything else. It was a good hanger on which to drape his teaching. But I think he believed it too.
Back to George's noodling on the essence, meaning, and purpose of art. Maybe the answers have something to do with that "human secret" notion.
"But mostly I am thinking of that feeling I got while watching it, which was the feeling of being lovingly comforted. That’s a feeling I’d like to give my future readers."
And that is exactly the feeling you give!! Every email from Story Club is like finding a giant hug in my inbox.
So there's no such thing as being "behind," but I am terribly behind with "My First Goose." Have been hosting family for the past few weeks and am now finally enjoying a bit of stillness where I get to rewind a bit and "catch up." What a blessing to be able to fill that stillness with your words.
OMG I wrote a story. This sounds like an odd thing to say in a group of writers, but it’s a big moment for me. I have not written a short story since I was in college. I was headed for a completely different academic track at that time, and then life intervened — marriage, kids including a special-needs child, graduate school, career — and now I am thinking about writing again. I realized I couldn’t follow George’s instruction to juxtapose any of my own works because I can’t even find any of those first stories (they are not gone, and someday I will find them). So I decided I was going to just get started. And I did! It’s not a great story, but it’s my own story and I’m … fond of it. It makes me happy even though I plan to revise it many times. And now I have a start. Buckling my seatbelt and really grateful for this ride.
"At a tender moment, the reader will feel she has a friend, in the story and its writer, even if that writer is long dead or from some faraway place. " After reading (and watching) your post, George, I thought immediately of “The Turkey Season” by Alice Munro. In 1983, I spent a week in my college Infirmary with assorted afflictions, surrounded by other sick young people in assigned beds. It was a depressing, silent place of suspended life. My mother sent me Munro’s collection "Moons of Jupiter" to read while I was there. When I read “Turkey Season,” –in which a young girl learns how to gut turkey carcasses in the killing barn, where bird-bodies hang upside down and limp—I had that true “feeling of being lovingly comforted.” By Munro, by my mother, and by the girl in the story who sings as she walks out of the barn of bodies into the snow. Munro’s "fundamental faith in humanity" turned the Infirmary into a memorable and even beautiful place. It was the first time a story ever befriended me in quite that way you describe, and yes, it did make all the difference.
There is no one for whom the world exists separate from all of us who experience it in relation to one another. So when we reflect life back to itself, we're not expressing some outside objective truth, because that outside truth does not exist (or if it does, it's not something that has relevance to us). But at the same time, there is always more outside of our own perspective than we can grasp. So the goal is neither one perspective, nor some objective, perspective-less state, but rather a confluence, a multiplicity of perspectives.
In writing, when we inhabit that intention-less state, we remain open to all those different ways of seeing. And in reading, we experience someone else's openness. A second-order multiplicity! (And then many people discussing a work together becomes a third-order multiplicity, and so on...)
By seeing things from many different angles, we can start to get a glimpse of that deeper truth that lies beneath all the seeming randomness of events. Things don't just happen arbitrarily. Everything is ultimately a result of many different factors coming together. And there are tendencies, patterns, in the ways these factors come together. So by comparing and contrasting many perspectives, we see what remains, what is eternal. And when we create art, we are creating an interpretation of the world that highlights those patterns and tendencies, that brings them to the fore.
And if the world is ultimately unfolding in certain patterns and tendencies (i.e. not static), then art teaches us not to know the world statically but to understand all the ways things might unfold in the future. We increasingly understand that the deeper truth of the world also includes all the ways the world *might be*.
"Nearly all of us have felt, at least in childhood, that if we imagine that a thing is so, it therefore either is so or can be made to become so. All of us have to learn that this almost never happens, or happens only in very limited ways; but the visionary, like the child, continues to believe that it always ought to happen. We are so possessed with the idea of the duty of acceptance that we are inclined to forget our mental birthright, and prudent and sensible people encourage us in this. That is why Blake is so full of aphorisms like 'If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.' Such wisdom is based on the fact that imagination creates reality, and as desire is a part of imagination, the world we desire is more real than the world we passively accept." (Northrop Frye)
I loved watching that Chaplin clip you shared!
It's striking to me that there is no villain. The sources of trouble are all innocent in their intentions. That plus the audience's being afraid on Chaplin's behalf led to a welling up in me of the heartening feeling/notion that we are all of us in this thing together.
As a lit nerd in high school, I made myself a T-shirt with this Moby-Dick quote:
"It's a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians."
So cool was I. 🤣
‘[I]f a story really is “an export of one human mind,” if it is really (just) a “psychological projection” – why should my story have any value or relevance to you?’
This is a really interesting question. I think there’s something about encountering another person’s imaginative take on the world that can prompt us to attend more closely to that world, to see it more clearly ourselves. I think very often we fall into habits of thought, ways of thinking about or seeing the world which may present themselves as objective but are often shot-through with our anxieties, biases, self-concern, and so on. But encountering the creativity of another consciousness can reawaken our own creative thinking and shake us out of the old habits of thought. And I think that experience can be very pleasing. It can feel to some extent like a kind of reintroduction to the world, a rediscovery of wonder--which it is.
I’m not sure what it is about human beings that explains why imagination and creativity can be such effective routes to truth, but I’m happy it is that way.
Processing this for later but just wanted to say something about your reaction to watching Chaplin's "The Circus". You wrote "I experience this as just pure joy, the exquisite exploitation of a premise, that has the effect of showing us, really showing us, how we are, how we behave, how we think. And the result is something like love, or maybe the kind of love God must feel for us."
This could have described my reaction to reading/listening to "Victory Lap" (as read by you, the author). It was for me during a low moment in a conga line of low moments, that I turned to Alexa, the only housemate I have who can hear (sadly, the pug is now deaf) and asked her to replay "The Tenth of December".
Hearing and re-reading "Victory Lap" filled me with unbridled joy -- just lifted my mood. I listened again in my car on an errand and when I got out, I found myself standing in a parking lot smiling -- no laughing -- to myself. In public. I don't mean this to be the blowing-smoke-up-the-author's-ass post but a confirmation that art has this power you ascribe it. There is a simple, life-affirmation in the best of it. Which says, "you are not alone, friend. You are never alone."
Hell, yes. And thank you.