Fiction is like drain cleaner — it's meant to clear out the pipes and restore flow, removing all the grime caked up on your soul's sense organ. That's why it doesn't matter whether you remember what you read. Same effect as leaving a matinee and finding the wind has something new to say.
"Such the perfections of fiction, as well as that honed cruelty it possesses which makes it useless. Everything it teaches is useless insofar as structuring your life: you can't prop up anything with fiction. It, in fact, teaches you just that. That in order to attempt to employ its specific wisdom is a sign of madness. Can you see some shattered man trying to heal his life by reading Tender Is the Night? In the back files of the Ladies' Home Journal there may, at least, be found the names of various physicians who will get you to the grave with a minimum of anguish-so they say. There is more profit in an hour's talk with Billy Graham than in a reading of Joyce. Graham might conceivably make you sick, so that you might move, go somewhere to get well. But Joyce just sends you out into the street, where the world goes on, solid as a bus. If you met Joyce and said "Help me," he'd hand you a copy of Finnegans Wake. You could both cry. Why is it that this should be? It is because fiction is real. When you writhe for Christopher Tietjens or the Consul, you writhe for real things that do not live..."
-Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things
I came across a good “point” to reading in this book called “Reader Come Home”:
to be continuously engaged in trying to reach and express our best thoughts so as to expand an ever truer, more beautiful understanding of the universe and to lead lives based on this vision. To embark on such a quest is the furthest goal of deep reading and the beginning of wisdom, but not its end. Just as Proust articulated years ago,
"the end of [the author's] wisdom is but the beginning of ours."
Fiction is like drain cleaner — it's meant to clear out the pipes and restore flow, removing all the grime caked up on your soul's sense organ. That's why it doesn't matter whether you remember what you read. Same effect as leaving a matinee and finding the wind has something new to say.
<3
this one was one of the hardest yet
My best guess on what you’re reading in the photo: a crossword puzzle book.
This is my first impression of you, and I am locked in.
Absolutely brilliant. You have left me in the pits of silence.
"Such the perfections of fiction, as well as that honed cruelty it possesses which makes it useless. Everything it teaches is useless insofar as structuring your life: you can't prop up anything with fiction. It, in fact, teaches you just that. That in order to attempt to employ its specific wisdom is a sign of madness. Can you see some shattered man trying to heal his life by reading Tender Is the Night? In the back files of the Ladies' Home Journal there may, at least, be found the names of various physicians who will get you to the grave with a minimum of anguish-so they say. There is more profit in an hour's talk with Billy Graham than in a reading of Joyce. Graham might conceivably make you sick, so that you might move, go somewhere to get well. But Joyce just sends you out into the street, where the world goes on, solid as a bus. If you met Joyce and said "Help me," he'd hand you a copy of Finnegans Wake. You could both cry. Why is it that this should be? It is because fiction is real. When you writhe for Christopher Tietjens or the Consul, you writhe for real things that do not live..."
-Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things
love this
I came across a good “point” to reading in this book called “Reader Come Home”:
to be continuously engaged in trying to reach and express our best thoughts so as to expand an ever truer, more beautiful understanding of the universe and to lead lives based on this vision. To embark on such a quest is the furthest goal of deep reading and the beginning of wisdom, but not its end. Just as Proust articulated years ago,
"the end of [the author's] wisdom is but the beginning of ours."
for James's real useful comments on fiction, see his 24 prefaces to the New York Edition of his work, 1904-07