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Jan. 24th, 2009
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Jan. 24th, 2009 07:46 amI'm cold and suspicious but like all cold, suspicious people have my sentimental points:
Desmond's saving Our Mutual Friend in Lost 2 made me feel both ashamed and gratified--I've been doing something similar with Tolstoy's Resurrection since about 2000. I've started it several times and loved what I read (it's extremely Christian and tendentious, like all late Tolstoy, but with him and only him it doesn't matter), but always break off shyly. I want there to be more if I need it. I think the title contributes to this superstition. I may need resurrection someday, not through Christ but through getting to read something by Tolstoy for the first time just one more time. I can see doing it with Dickens, too--I can never quite fit him in with my understanding of the planet but there's life there. One of the earliest sequences in Bleak House, where Esther has been taken to the messy house of some monstrous woman, was one of the first things I read that put me realize anything could be done with words, and that therefore hardly anything ever is. It was such a throwaway scene, too--and I'm not saying what followed was less vivid. But after that I was less astonished that a story could be so absorbing, so fearsome and total and able to make us thoughtlessly transfer all our desires and resources to new work in some new world.
I wonder if it's truer to say that the best reading experiences are so great because they're like being young again, or that being young is so great (and you know you're not young anymore when you can type that straight-faced) because it's like the best reading experiences. That new, that full of forward.
Desmond's saving Our Mutual Friend in Lost 2 made me feel both ashamed and gratified--I've been doing something similar with Tolstoy's Resurrection since about 2000. I've started it several times and loved what I read (it's extremely Christian and tendentious, like all late Tolstoy, but with him and only him it doesn't matter), but always break off shyly. I want there to be more if I need it. I think the title contributes to this superstition. I may need resurrection someday, not through Christ but through getting to read something by Tolstoy for the first time just one more time. I can see doing it with Dickens, too--I can never quite fit him in with my understanding of the planet but there's life there. One of the earliest sequences in Bleak House, where Esther has been taken to the messy house of some monstrous woman, was one of the first things I read that put me realize anything could be done with words, and that therefore hardly anything ever is. It was such a throwaway scene, too--and I'm not saying what followed was less vivid. But after that I was less astonished that a story could be so absorbing, so fearsome and total and able to make us thoughtlessly transfer all our desires and resources to new work in some new world.
I wonder if it's truer to say that the best reading experiences are so great because they're like being young again, or that being young is so great (and you know you're not young anymore when you can type that straight-faced) because it's like the best reading experiences. That new, that full of forward.