"The Child that Books Built" by Francis Spufford
First read: 17.07.10
This is an autobiography but of someone for whom fiction is their life so sometimes the lines blur. As someone like that, I loved it.
QUOTES:
☆ One of the first things you learn as you begin to read is the amazing exterior invisbility of all the rush of event and image which narrative pours through you. PP. 3-4
☆ Imagine feeling your mind sleekly stocked with all the reading there is, like a cupboard of perfectly folded linen. You'd ready for anything.) No, the difficulty is that when you're conscious of the mass of fictional possibilities extending away and away, to choose between becomes lengthier and lengthier taks.
I don't give up. It is entwined too deeply with my history, it has been forming the way I see for to long. And I have a cultural sanction for my addiction. PP. 6
☆ The wise man points to the moon but the fool looks at the finger - Chinese Proverb.
☆ A great part of the power of fiction rests on its ability to indicate, to point out truths once we allow it to work as an arena for people like ourselves, who happen to be imaginary. PP. 7
☆ Our reverence for books, too, has really not much to do with them requiring deeper concentration than Mortal Kombat. It is the directions they can point us in that we value - and then the way those interact deep down in our reading minds with the directions our own temperaments are tentatively taking.
☆ ...we hope it can bring a fully uttered clarity to the living we do, which is, we know, so hard to disentangle and articulate. And when it does, when a fiction does trip a profound recognition the reward is more than an inert item of knowledge. The book becomes part of the history of our self-understanding. The stories that mean most to us join the process by which we become securely our own.... And it isn't just because books bring the world to them; books bring them, in new ways, to themselves. PP. 8-9
☆ Sometime in childhood I made a bargain that limited, so I thought, the power over me that real experience had, the real experience which comes to us in act and incident and through the proximate, continous existence of those we love..... So that (in theory) the moment I actually lived in could never fill me completely, whatever was happening. For the first years of the bargain, my idea was that good writing should vanish from attention altogether while you read it, so that the piped experience pressing back the world should seem as liquid and embracing - as unverbal - as what it competed with. Pp. 16-17
☆ As the 70s went on, these assumptions would lose their credibility.... Evil would revert to being an unsolved problem. Pp. 19
☆ The passion aroused by fiction can be for any of the things that are absent at the time of reading; any greedy wish will do.
☆ ..for the words we take into ourselves help to shape us. They help form the questions we think are worth asking; they shift the boundaries of the sayable inside us, and the related borders of what's acceptable... Pp. 21
☆ But each travelled separately, because it was the nature of the forest that you were alone in it. It was the place in which by definition you had no companions, and no resources except for your own uncertain self. It was the Wild where relationship ceases, where connection is suspended. Pp. 25
☆ There are no orphans in Hopi society. It would be culturally impossible for a child to fall right through their densely failsafed weave of family, no matter who died. But even for Hopis, the situation of abandonment seems to be a necessary one to imagine, to hug to oneself in the form of a story. It focuses a self-pity that everyone wants to feel sometimes, and that perhaps helps a child o adolescent to think through their fundamental separatedness. The situation expresses the solitude humans discover as we grow up no matter how well our kinship system works. PP. 28
☆ ....Bruno Bettelheim wrote, "the brother who leaves soon finds himself in a deep, dark forest, where he feels lost, having given up the organisation of his life which the parental home provided, and not yet having built up the inner structures which we develop only under the impact of life experiences we have to master more or less on our own."
☆ The forest is where you are when your surroundings are not mastered. PP. 29-30
☆ Stories were admitted to conscious instruments to handle the unconscious, in sync with a humbler perception of psychoanalysis itself as producing a kind of story from the interplay in the consulting room. PP. 31
☆ The only child who never grows up is the child that adults imagine themselves being. A real child perpetually changes, has new experiences, has the same experiences in new ways. PP. 35-36.
☆ It is a law of the world for adults that the physical properties of the enviroment around you only change in predictable ways, by predictable processes (barring things arriving from completely outside the ordinary context of things). For adults, the world is dynamic, but intelligible, at least at a level of everyday perception. Pre-operational children, according to Piaget's experiments, seemed not to know that things existed in dependable quantities. PP. 37
☆ But Piaget too it as common sense that a child learned something first, then was able to say it. Words expressed what you already knew. They didn't contribute on their own account - or lead intellectual development in particular directions. PP. 40
☆ ...small children understood language best when it was, so to speak, fused with a situation, and all the non-linguistic clues to hand could be brought to bear. PP. 41
☆ This permanent inclination in humans to grasp words quicken when events sustain them, directs us to a time when words and events run much closer in our minds, and we were "reading" what happened around us without making hard-and-fast distinctions between what people said and what it seemed they wanted. PP. 42
☆ And what, paradoxically, is the most embedded form of language, for all that it seems devoted to carrying those who hear it outside the context of the moment? What way of speaking deals out situations one after another, is full of concrete particulars, and keeps a beady eye on people's intentions all the time? PP. 44
☆ In fairy tales, famously, character is destiny. Who the personages are, and what happens to them, are completely inseparable. PP. 50
☆ "Only those fvoices from without are effective", wrote the critic Kennet Burke in 1950, "which speak in the language of a voice within." Studies in the 1960s and 1970s of the stories children themselves tell at two and three found a relationshipbetween how "socially acceptable" the actions in them were, and how much they took place in the recognisable, everyday world of the child's own experience. If they included taboo behaviour like hitting a parent... they were les slikely to have a realistic setting, less likely to feature a teller as a character and much less likely to be told in the present tense.... Dangerous things were moved further away in place and time, and were not allowed to have to even a proxy with the same name as the child. Children a year or two older no longer varied the present tense and past tense, because they consistenly told all stories in the past tense... PP. 52
☆ and for a rule to be fully understood involves imagining what happens when you break it. Or a parallel argument is available out of the psychoanalytic tradition, as Bettelheim extended it to fairy stories. A person can only grow to full maturity if their ego is able to draw on and transform the dark but powerful energies of the id. You must come to terms with your unconscious, and at the age when it would be too disturbing to confront your unconscious forces under their own names, the bes way to begin is by dealing with them through the symbols of story. PP. 53
☆ These were the usual naiveties that result when psychoanalysis takes its search for the psyche's permanent structures into the changing, particular, context-determined material of culture. Similar complaints had been made about Freud's original use of Greek myths.
☆ It centres on Bettelheim's comfortable, even complacent sense that a fairy-tale plot is a wholly internal drama. PP. 55
☆ There is, however, an order in which a symbol creates its meanings, as feminists and others have pointed out. A character in a story exists in particular before it exist in general. A wicked stepmother is a woman before she is a symbol of what a child might fear in motherhood. The story of Snow White says things about gender...
☆ They are the means by which meaning arises at all. Every story has to be taken literally before it is taken any other way. Bettelheim's determination to skip this stage in a story's functioning could produce grotesque results.PP. 56
☆ Astonishingly, the moral traditionally tacked on to the story was that curiosity is dangerous. PP. 57
☆ Bettelheim had assumed that the roles of men and women, children and parents in pre-feminist America effectively corresponded with psychological truth. PP. 58
☆ I've always wanted life to be more storylike; I've always reached out for treats, set-ups, situations that can be coaxed by charm and by the right deliberate richness of an invented scene. Friends and lovers have known me as someone willing to say aloud sentences they thought could only exist on the page, in the hope that real time could be arranged and embroidered. PP. 62
☆ Like a fixed star, the idea of perfection, for example, might be useful to navigate b even if it could never be reached. Otherwise, it was a vacuum out there... Wittgenstein went further in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, for him, language ended at the boundary of the circle, and with it, existence in any sense that language was capable of describing. It was not even meaningful to talk about going "beyond" the boundary. There was no outside. The line of the frontier was the curved edge of the universe. It had no other side. You could only talk about human existence happeing against a background of profound mystery. PP. 89
☆ A soap is only a social island where the supply of events has metastasised. What matter is that the people should be willy-nilly interlocked with one another, so that the effects of what each does are felt as a pulse that propagates through the connections between them. Any sufficiently connected community of the right size will do. It has to be large enough for mutual knowledge to be incomplete, but small enough for the resulting secrets still to be powerful. PP. 114
☆ But America it's unique on its emphasis on liberty, not as the means to some further end like social justice, but as the final and ultimate end in itself, the completion of everything politics can do for the individual.... American elections are really about selecting competent administrators, to oversee an ancient consensus... It is just living that is invested with revolutionary fervour. 119-120.
☆ What they are is not established by interaction. They stand in their setting like an actor in fron of a curtain, quite independent of circumstances, and effectively invulnerable. They do not require your participation to be, either. Since you already know them completely, you do not have to make an effort understanding when you read about them. (is conflict like this?)
☆ On the other hand, when I read the stories that took me to town, I had to learn about even the most simplified, or idealised, or stylised people by watching what they did. Understanding came bit by bit, and it resembled the knowledge you had of real people.... They existed in relationship to each other, but also, in a way, in relationship to you. PP. 124-125
☆ This was unthinkable, of course: but unthinkable because his character forbade it, not because such a thing was ruled out by the structure of the fictional universe he inhabited. It could have happened. People could surprise you, disappoint you, show you new sides to themselves. They could change; they could even be destroyed.
☆ If you tried to step into their skin by imagining them being you, you learned nothing except on the level of sensation. The stimuli that made them wince and gasp now made you wince and gasp too, in imagination.
☆ To understand somebody else's life as it feels to the person living, you have to imagine you being them, a far harder task, for it refuses sympathy's speedy, magical wiring-together of two nervous systems. Instead, reading, you empty yourself so far as you can, and you try to subdue yourself to the material of another life, to ahve the horizons another life has, to enter its separate density.... But fiction's access to people's unspoken thoughts made it possible; and the ultimate reward of the town was an empathy independent of liking, broader than justice, that if you had been applying to real people, as opposed to fictional ones, you might have called "respect". PP. 130-131
☆ The price of freedom is that no one rescues you from the consequences of your mistakes. PP. 140
2010, 2010: autobiography in english, book-2010, #biography, #non-fiction, *author: male, @read in english, +bookish, +on writing, [quotes], [quotes] book, [quotes] book/non-fiction
This is an autobiography but of someone for whom fiction is their life so sometimes the lines blur. As someone like that, I loved it.
QUOTES:
☆ One of the first things you learn as you begin to read is the amazing exterior invisbility of all the rush of event and image which narrative pours through you. PP. 3-4
☆ Imagine feeling your mind sleekly stocked with all the reading there is, like a cupboard of perfectly folded linen. You'd ready for anything.) No, the difficulty is that when you're conscious of the mass of fictional possibilities extending away and away, to choose between becomes lengthier and lengthier taks.
I don't give up. It is entwined too deeply with my history, it has been forming the way I see for to long. And I have a cultural sanction for my addiction. PP. 6
☆ The wise man points to the moon but the fool looks at the finger - Chinese Proverb.
☆ A great part of the power of fiction rests on its ability to indicate, to point out truths once we allow it to work as an arena for people like ourselves, who happen to be imaginary. PP. 7
☆ Our reverence for books, too, has really not much to do with them requiring deeper concentration than Mortal Kombat. It is the directions they can point us in that we value - and then the way those interact deep down in our reading minds with the directions our own temperaments are tentatively taking.
☆ ...we hope it can bring a fully uttered clarity to the living we do, which is, we know, so hard to disentangle and articulate. And when it does, when a fiction does trip a profound recognition the reward is more than an inert item of knowledge. The book becomes part of the history of our self-understanding. The stories that mean most to us join the process by which we become securely our own.... And it isn't just because books bring the world to them; books bring them, in new ways, to themselves. PP. 8-9
☆ Sometime in childhood I made a bargain that limited, so I thought, the power over me that real experience had, the real experience which comes to us in act and incident and through the proximate, continous existence of those we love..... So that (in theory) the moment I actually lived in could never fill me completely, whatever was happening. For the first years of the bargain, my idea was that good writing should vanish from attention altogether while you read it, so that the piped experience pressing back the world should seem as liquid and embracing - as unverbal - as what it competed with. Pp. 16-17
☆ As the 70s went on, these assumptions would lose their credibility.... Evil would revert to being an unsolved problem. Pp. 19
☆ The passion aroused by fiction can be for any of the things that are absent at the time of reading; any greedy wish will do.
☆ ..for the words we take into ourselves help to shape us. They help form the questions we think are worth asking; they shift the boundaries of the sayable inside us, and the related borders of what's acceptable... Pp. 21
☆ But each travelled separately, because it was the nature of the forest that you were alone in it. It was the place in which by definition you had no companions, and no resources except for your own uncertain self. It was the Wild where relationship ceases, where connection is suspended. Pp. 25
☆ There are no orphans in Hopi society. It would be culturally impossible for a child to fall right through their densely failsafed weave of family, no matter who died. But even for Hopis, the situation of abandonment seems to be a necessary one to imagine, to hug to oneself in the form of a story. It focuses a self-pity that everyone wants to feel sometimes, and that perhaps helps a child o adolescent to think through their fundamental separatedness. The situation expresses the solitude humans discover as we grow up no matter how well our kinship system works. PP. 28
☆ ....Bruno Bettelheim wrote, "the brother who leaves soon finds himself in a deep, dark forest, where he feels lost, having given up the organisation of his life which the parental home provided, and not yet having built up the inner structures which we develop only under the impact of life experiences we have to master more or less on our own."
☆ The forest is where you are when your surroundings are not mastered. PP. 29-30
☆ Stories were admitted to conscious instruments to handle the unconscious, in sync with a humbler perception of psychoanalysis itself as producing a kind of story from the interplay in the consulting room. PP. 31
☆ The only child who never grows up is the child that adults imagine themselves being. A real child perpetually changes, has new experiences, has the same experiences in new ways. PP. 35-36.
☆ It is a law of the world for adults that the physical properties of the enviroment around you only change in predictable ways, by predictable processes (barring things arriving from completely outside the ordinary context of things). For adults, the world is dynamic, but intelligible, at least at a level of everyday perception. Pre-operational children, according to Piaget's experiments, seemed not to know that things existed in dependable quantities. PP. 37
☆ But Piaget too it as common sense that a child learned something first, then was able to say it. Words expressed what you already knew. They didn't contribute on their own account - or lead intellectual development in particular directions. PP. 40
☆ ...small children understood language best when it was, so to speak, fused with a situation, and all the non-linguistic clues to hand could be brought to bear. PP. 41
☆ This permanent inclination in humans to grasp words quicken when events sustain them, directs us to a time when words and events run much closer in our minds, and we were "reading" what happened around us without making hard-and-fast distinctions between what people said and what it seemed they wanted. PP. 42
☆ And what, paradoxically, is the most embedded form of language, for all that it seems devoted to carrying those who hear it outside the context of the moment? What way of speaking deals out situations one after another, is full of concrete particulars, and keeps a beady eye on people's intentions all the time? PP. 44
☆ In fairy tales, famously, character is destiny. Who the personages are, and what happens to them, are completely inseparable. PP. 50
☆ "Only those fvoices from without are effective", wrote the critic Kennet Burke in 1950, "which speak in the language of a voice within." Studies in the 1960s and 1970s of the stories children themselves tell at two and three found a relationshipbetween how "socially acceptable" the actions in them were, and how much they took place in the recognisable, everyday world of the child's own experience. If they included taboo behaviour like hitting a parent... they were les slikely to have a realistic setting, less likely to feature a teller as a character and much less likely to be told in the present tense.... Dangerous things were moved further away in place and time, and were not allowed to have to even a proxy with the same name as the child. Children a year or two older no longer varied the present tense and past tense, because they consistenly told all stories in the past tense... PP. 52
☆ and for a rule to be fully understood involves imagining what happens when you break it. Or a parallel argument is available out of the psychoanalytic tradition, as Bettelheim extended it to fairy stories. A person can only grow to full maturity if their ego is able to draw on and transform the dark but powerful energies of the id. You must come to terms with your unconscious, and at the age when it would be too disturbing to confront your unconscious forces under their own names, the bes way to begin is by dealing with them through the symbols of story. PP. 53
☆ These were the usual naiveties that result when psychoanalysis takes its search for the psyche's permanent structures into the changing, particular, context-determined material of culture. Similar complaints had been made about Freud's original use of Greek myths.
☆ It centres on Bettelheim's comfortable, even complacent sense that a fairy-tale plot is a wholly internal drama. PP. 55
☆ There is, however, an order in which a symbol creates its meanings, as feminists and others have pointed out. A character in a story exists in particular before it exist in general. A wicked stepmother is a woman before she is a symbol of what a child might fear in motherhood. The story of Snow White says things about gender...
☆ They are the means by which meaning arises at all. Every story has to be taken literally before it is taken any other way. Bettelheim's determination to skip this stage in a story's functioning could produce grotesque results.PP. 56
☆ Astonishingly, the moral traditionally tacked on to the story was that curiosity is dangerous. PP. 57
☆ Bettelheim had assumed that the roles of men and women, children and parents in pre-feminist America effectively corresponded with psychological truth. PP. 58
☆ I've always wanted life to be more storylike; I've always reached out for treats, set-ups, situations that can be coaxed by charm and by the right deliberate richness of an invented scene. Friends and lovers have known me as someone willing to say aloud sentences they thought could only exist on the page, in the hope that real time could be arranged and embroidered. PP. 62
☆ Like a fixed star, the idea of perfection, for example, might be useful to navigate b even if it could never be reached. Otherwise, it was a vacuum out there... Wittgenstein went further in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, for him, language ended at the boundary of the circle, and with it, existence in any sense that language was capable of describing. It was not even meaningful to talk about going "beyond" the boundary. There was no outside. The line of the frontier was the curved edge of the universe. It had no other side. You could only talk about human existence happeing against a background of profound mystery. PP. 89
☆ A soap is only a social island where the supply of events has metastasised. What matter is that the people should be willy-nilly interlocked with one another, so that the effects of what each does are felt as a pulse that propagates through the connections between them. Any sufficiently connected community of the right size will do. It has to be large enough for mutual knowledge to be incomplete, but small enough for the resulting secrets still to be powerful. PP. 114
☆ But America it's unique on its emphasis on liberty, not as the means to some further end like social justice, but as the final and ultimate end in itself, the completion of everything politics can do for the individual.... American elections are really about selecting competent administrators, to oversee an ancient consensus... It is just living that is invested with revolutionary fervour. 119-120.
☆ What they are is not established by interaction. They stand in their setting like an actor in fron of a curtain, quite independent of circumstances, and effectively invulnerable. They do not require your participation to be, either. Since you already know them completely, you do not have to make an effort understanding when you read about them. (is conflict like this?)
☆ On the other hand, when I read the stories that took me to town, I had to learn about even the most simplified, or idealised, or stylised people by watching what they did. Understanding came bit by bit, and it resembled the knowledge you had of real people.... They existed in relationship to each other, but also, in a way, in relationship to you. PP. 124-125
☆ This was unthinkable, of course: but unthinkable because his character forbade it, not because such a thing was ruled out by the structure of the fictional universe he inhabited. It could have happened. People could surprise you, disappoint you, show you new sides to themselves. They could change; they could even be destroyed.
☆ If you tried to step into their skin by imagining them being you, you learned nothing except on the level of sensation. The stimuli that made them wince and gasp now made you wince and gasp too, in imagination.
☆ To understand somebody else's life as it feels to the person living, you have to imagine you being them, a far harder task, for it refuses sympathy's speedy, magical wiring-together of two nervous systems. Instead, reading, you empty yourself so far as you can, and you try to subdue yourself to the material of another life, to ahve the horizons another life has, to enter its separate density.... But fiction's access to people's unspoken thoughts made it possible; and the ultimate reward of the town was an empathy independent of liking, broader than justice, that if you had been applying to real people, as opposed to fictional ones, you might have called "respect". PP. 130-131
☆ The price of freedom is that no one rescues you from the consequences of your mistakes. PP. 140
2010, 2010: autobiography in english, book-2010, #biography, #non-fiction, *author: male, @read in english, +bookish, +on writing, [quotes], [quotes] book, [quotes] book/non-fiction