"In a good conversation, it’s both/and. You want sameness and difference. You want, sometimes, to be affirmed in what you already know, and other times, to be completely shaken out of it."
I love this observation! I've had this thought when it comes to literature as a transformative experience. If a book is going to change us, make us see the world differently, it has to meet us in this space of sameness and difference. It has to be different enough to change our perspective, but similar enough to be legible and sympathetic. Which might just be to say: great encounters with books work like great conversations.
Yes, I love this applied to how literature works on us: "different enough to change out perspective, but similar enouugh to be legible and sympathetic." It's making me think about how choice works in reading-- because it's so easy to gravitate towards sameness when selecting a book (the things that naturally seem like they'll speak to us), but the difference part of the equation is what prompts the change. Though it's also hard to orchestrate transformation; the pieces that end up having that effect (on me anyway) are usually the ones where I'm not looking for it or selecting them myself. Anyway, now I'm thinking about how to nudge my reading list in unexpected directions. . . Recommendations welcome!
“It might be—it often is—that you’re not especially capable of expression yourself at the moment, that you are taking things in because you have no words, anymore, for whatever it is you would say if you could. And then, when you are not expecting it, something from the outside slips all the way in. The ideas and the language swirl around inside, and somewhere between your experience and this swirl of thought, there is a poem.”
Thank you, Jane— this is a really good description of where poems come from!
"In a good conversation, it’s both/and. You want sameness and difference. You want, sometimes, to be affirmed in what you already know, and other times, to be completely shaken out of it."
I love this observation! I've had this thought when it comes to literature as a transformative experience. If a book is going to change us, make us see the world differently, it has to meet us in this space of sameness and difference. It has to be different enough to change our perspective, but similar enough to be legible and sympathetic. Which might just be to say: great encounters with books work like great conversations.
Yes, I love this applied to how literature works on us: "different enough to change out perspective, but similar enouugh to be legible and sympathetic." It's making me think about how choice works in reading-- because it's so easy to gravitate towards sameness when selecting a book (the things that naturally seem like they'll speak to us), but the difference part of the equation is what prompts the change. Though it's also hard to orchestrate transformation; the pieces that end up having that effect (on me anyway) are usually the ones where I'm not looking for it or selecting them myself. Anyway, now I'm thinking about how to nudge my reading list in unexpected directions. . . Recommendations welcome!
“It might be—it often is—that you’re not especially capable of expression yourself at the moment, that you are taking things in because you have no words, anymore, for whatever it is you would say if you could. And then, when you are not expecting it, something from the outside slips all the way in. The ideas and the language swirl around inside, and somewhere between your experience and this swirl of thought, there is a poem.”
Thank you, Jane— this is a really good description of where poems come from!