Last night, as I lay trying to go to sleep, a strange sort of bitter melancholia overtook me for a few moments. "What's the point of my reading literature?" I asked myself. "Literature is supposed to be transformative, to nourish the soul, to make a better person. But I don't feel transformed, my soul doesn't seem particuarly well-fed, and I seem like the same old damn person. Why bother?" This feeling lasted only a moment, but the truth is I can't quite answer the questions.
Has literature done anything more for me than entertain and delight? Is that all I can really expect? Aren't entertainment and delight ends enough in their own right? Is this literature-as-spiritual-transcendence crap just a bunch of hot air? Am I just "not getting it"? Am I doomed to wander through the Lands of Literature as a mere tourist and not as an enlightened resident? Or has literature simply had a more subtle influence on me than the grand, road to Damascus ephiphanies of others? Is my whole "I'm a bibliphile English major" thing just so much artifice and pretension on my part? I'm I really just a philistine couch potato with a weird paper fetish? Hast though forsaken me, Logos?
2 comments:
Don't try so hard. Read for fun (not out of obligation). Thrown down Nietzsche if he bores you and read Willa Cather or Dashiel Hammett. Whatever! Just read for fun. Don't look for grand transformations. Like love, literature-as-transcendence insinuates itself into one's life, quietly, definitively, unannounced and unbidden (is this a word? whatever!).
Thank you, camicao. That's pretty much what I believe, too, but we all have those maudlin existential moments. And, yes, "unbidden" is definitely a word!
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