Listening to Dylan’s excellent Nobel Prize lecture got me thinking about literature. Dylan’s lecture explores the influence of three novels on his life ‘Moby Dick, All Quiet On The Western Front and The Odyssey’. The most remarkable aspect of the lecture is that Dylan takes you inside of the novels and makes you feel that it is he that experiencing such things (as is the listener). After all ,is that not the purpose of art? To let you experience other worlds and in the same time learn about you and yours?
When I was a child I read all of the adventure books (the Magic Key series, Fuzzbuzz, the Famous Five and so forth) as these took me to other worlds, however, I did not love the books the same way that I loved books such as Collin Dann’s Fox Cub Bold (as I’ve written about previously) and Nina Bawden’s The Finding. These two books showed a part of me that could not be shown by other literature. Whether one can call it a profound and intense loneliness, I don’t know. Anyway, everyone is lonely, it is the human condition to be lonely and if everyone ceased to be lonely then civilisation as we know it would collapse for it is clearly built upon male inferiority complexes and loneliness.
As one grows so does one’s reading. I went through the usual passages as any child- Stephen King, Lord of the Rings, Point Horror, Goosebumps (reader beware, you’re in for a scare!) and so forth but it was poetry that cast its ineffable enthral spell over me. When I was ten I saw The Simpsons’ take of Poe’s The Raven. I did not know that it was Poe until many years later but the power and majesty of The Raven inhabited my soul, burrowed into my mind and many years later I cannot remove myself from its grasp, to quote Poe
And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted—nevermore!
And every time I reread it I discover some new depths to it. I even committed the sin of rewriting it, but from the perspective of the raven. Is it really some monster or is it just some lost bird seeking shelter from the storm?
The next novel to change my life happened because it showed me more of me than I knew, and would take many years to understand what it meant. The Idiot by Dostoyevsky tells the tale of a young man whom everyone calls an idiot trying to survive within the social world, a world which does not allow individuality. Young Myshkin, unaware of conventions, throws himself at the feet of the girl whom he loves and does lots of other unsocially acceptable things, things born of a naïve innocence and purity. However, for all of their disparaging remarks those around both love and long to be loved by the one they call an idiot, yet they cannot admit this, not even to themselves.
Here is the power of literature, it takes you into a world that reveals the world in which you live. As Picasso said ‘art is the lie that makes us realise the truth’ and as Wittgenstein wrote ‘the human body is the best picture of the human soul’, so go, and pick up a book and maybe, just maybe, you’ll discover your inner world within the pages.
‘till next time
I can be reached any time at thegreaterfool2016@yahoo.com
thegreaterfool2016 