A weapon in my arsenal against the bloodlessness of legalese
This is an awesome essay
by Andre Aciman. It makes me feel better because it's full of big words without an ounce of concrete reality that doesn't soar into philosophy. It's wonderfully indulgent and makes the writerly side of me happy.
It wasn’t Rome itself I was seeing; it was the film, the filter I’d placed on the old city that finally made me love it, the film I went to seek each time I’d go to a bookstore and would come out late in the evening to stroll down my Nevsky Prospect in search of vague smiles and fellowship in a city I wasn’t even sure existed on the sidewalks. It is the film I can no longer lift off the many books I read back then, the film that reverberates over time and continues to make Rome mine long after I’ve lost it. And perhaps it is the film I go in search of each time I’m back in Rome-not Rome. We seldom ever see, or read, or love things as they in themselves really are, nor, for that matter, do we even know our impressions of them as they really are. What matters is knowing what we see when we see other than what lies before us. It is the film we see, the film that breathes essence into otherwise lifeless objects, the film we crave to share with others. What we reach for and what ultimately touches us is the radiance we’ve projected on things, not the things themselves-the envelope, not the letter, the wrapping, not the gift.
Lucretius says somewhere that all objects release films, or “peeled skins” of themselves. These intimations travel from the objects and beings around us and eventually reach our senses. But the opposite is also true: we radiate films of what we have within us and project them on everything we see-which is how we become aware of the world and, ultimately, why we come to love it. Without these films, these fictions, which are both our alibis and the archive of our innermost life, we have no way to connect to or touch anything.
I learned to read and to love books much as I learned to know and to love Rome: not only by intuiting undisclosed passageways everywhere, but by seeing more of me in books than there probably was, because everything I read seemed more in me already than on the pages themselves. I knew that my way of reading books might be aberrant, just as I knew that figuring my way around Rome as I did would shock the fussiest of tourists.
I was after something intimate and I learned to spot it in the first alley, in the first verse of a poem, on the first glance of a stranger. Great books, like great cities, always let us find things we think are only in us and couldn’t possibly belong elsewhere but that turn out to be broadcast everywhere we look. Great artists are those who give us what we think was already ours. Never mind that we’ve never seen, felt, or lived through anything remotely similar. The artist converts us; he steals and refashions our past, and like songs from our adolescence, gives us the picture of our youth as we wished it to be back then-never as it really was. He gives us our secret wishfilm back.
Suddenly, the insights nursed by strangers belong, against all odds, to us as well. We know what an author desires, what he dissembles; we even know why. The better a writer, the better he erases his footprints-yet the better the writer, the more he wants us to intuit and put back those parts he chose to hide. With the right hunch, you could read the inflection of an author’s soul on a single comma, in one sentence, and from that one sentence seize the whole book, his life work.
With the right hunch. Pascal: “Il faut deviner, mais bien deviner.” [You have to guess-and guess right.]
What I found in the authors I grew to love was precisely the right to assume that I hadn’t misread them at all, that I wasn’t making up what I was seeing, and that I was getting the obvious meaning as well as the one they were not too keen to proclaim and might gainsay if confronted, perhaps because they themselves were not seeing it as clearly as they should, or were pretending not to. I was intuiting something for which there was no proof but that I knew was essential, because without this one unstated thing, their work wouldn’t hold.
It never occurred to me then that insight and intuition, which are the essence, the genius of all criticism, are born from this intimate fusion of self with something or someone else. To everything-books, places, people-I brought a desire to steal into and intuit something undisclosed, perhaps because I mistrusted all appearances, or because I was so withdrawn that I needed to believe others were as dissembled and withdrawn as I feared I was. Perhaps I loved prying. Perhaps insight was like touching-but without asking, without risk. Perhaps spying was my way of reaching out to the Roman life that was all around me. In the words of Emanuele Tesauro: “We enjoy seeing our own thoughts blossom in someone’s mind, while that someone is equally pleased to spy what our own mind furtively conceals.” I was a cipher. But, like me, everyone was a cipher as well. Ultimately, I wanted to peer into books, places, and people because wherever I looked I was always looking for myself, or for traces of myself, or better yet, for a world out there filled with people and characters who could be made to be like me, because being like me and being me and liking the things I liked was nothing more than their roundabout way of being as close to, as open to, and as bound to me as I wished to be to them. The world in my image. All I cared for were streets that bore my name and the trace of my passage there; and all I cared for were novels in which everyone’s soul was laid bare and anatomized, because nothing interested me more than the nether, undisclosed aspects of people and things that were identical to mine. Exposed, everyone would turn out to be just like me. They understood me, I understood them, we were no longer strangers. I dissembled, they dissembled. The more they were like me, the more I’d learn to accept and perhaps grow to like who I was. My hunches, my insights were nothing more than furtive ways of bridging the insuperable distance between me and the world.
by Andre Aciman. It makes me feel better because it's full of big words without an ounce of concrete reality that doesn't soar into philosophy. It's wonderfully indulgent and makes the writerly side of me happy.
It wasn’t Rome itself I was seeing; it was the film, the filter I’d placed on the old city that finally made me love it, the film I went to seek each time I’d go to a bookstore and would come out late in the evening to stroll down my Nevsky Prospect in search of vague smiles and fellowship in a city I wasn’t even sure existed on the sidewalks. It is the film I can no longer lift off the many books I read back then, the film that reverberates over time and continues to make Rome mine long after I’ve lost it. And perhaps it is the film I go in search of each time I’m back in Rome-not Rome. We seldom ever see, or read, or love things as they in themselves really are, nor, for that matter, do we even know our impressions of them as they really are. What matters is knowing what we see when we see other than what lies before us. It is the film we see, the film that breathes essence into otherwise lifeless objects, the film we crave to share with others. What we reach for and what ultimately touches us is the radiance we’ve projected on things, not the things themselves-the envelope, not the letter, the wrapping, not the gift.
Lucretius says somewhere that all objects release films, or “peeled skins” of themselves. These intimations travel from the objects and beings around us and eventually reach our senses. But the opposite is also true: we radiate films of what we have within us and project them on everything we see-which is how we become aware of the world and, ultimately, why we come to love it. Without these films, these fictions, which are both our alibis and the archive of our innermost life, we have no way to connect to or touch anything.
I learned to read and to love books much as I learned to know and to love Rome: not only by intuiting undisclosed passageways everywhere, but by seeing more of me in books than there probably was, because everything I read seemed more in me already than on the pages themselves. I knew that my way of reading books might be aberrant, just as I knew that figuring my way around Rome as I did would shock the fussiest of tourists.
I was after something intimate and I learned to spot it in the first alley, in the first verse of a poem, on the first glance of a stranger. Great books, like great cities, always let us find things we think are only in us and couldn’t possibly belong elsewhere but that turn out to be broadcast everywhere we look. Great artists are those who give us what we think was already ours. Never mind that we’ve never seen, felt, or lived through anything remotely similar. The artist converts us; he steals and refashions our past, and like songs from our adolescence, gives us the picture of our youth as we wished it to be back then-never as it really was. He gives us our secret wishfilm back.
Suddenly, the insights nursed by strangers belong, against all odds, to us as well. We know what an author desires, what he dissembles; we even know why. The better a writer, the better he erases his footprints-yet the better the writer, the more he wants us to intuit and put back those parts he chose to hide. With the right hunch, you could read the inflection of an author’s soul on a single comma, in one sentence, and from that one sentence seize the whole book, his life work.
With the right hunch. Pascal: “Il faut deviner, mais bien deviner.” [You have to guess-and guess right.]
What I found in the authors I grew to love was precisely the right to assume that I hadn’t misread them at all, that I wasn’t making up what I was seeing, and that I was getting the obvious meaning as well as the one they were not too keen to proclaim and might gainsay if confronted, perhaps because they themselves were not seeing it as clearly as they should, or were pretending not to. I was intuiting something for which there was no proof but that I knew was essential, because without this one unstated thing, their work wouldn’t hold.
It never occurred to me then that insight and intuition, which are the essence, the genius of all criticism, are born from this intimate fusion of self with something or someone else. To everything-books, places, people-I brought a desire to steal into and intuit something undisclosed, perhaps because I mistrusted all appearances, or because I was so withdrawn that I needed to believe others were as dissembled and withdrawn as I feared I was. Perhaps I loved prying. Perhaps insight was like touching-but without asking, without risk. Perhaps spying was my way of reaching out to the Roman life that was all around me. In the words of Emanuele Tesauro: “We enjoy seeing our own thoughts blossom in someone’s mind, while that someone is equally pleased to spy what our own mind furtively conceals.” I was a cipher. But, like me, everyone was a cipher as well. Ultimately, I wanted to peer into books, places, and people because wherever I looked I was always looking for myself, or for traces of myself, or better yet, for a world out there filled with people and characters who could be made to be like me, because being like me and being me and liking the things I liked was nothing more than their roundabout way of being as close to, as open to, and as bound to me as I wished to be to them. The world in my image. All I cared for were streets that bore my name and the trace of my passage there; and all I cared for were novels in which everyone’s soul was laid bare and anatomized, because nothing interested me more than the nether, undisclosed aspects of people and things that were identical to mine. Exposed, everyone would turn out to be just like me. They understood me, I understood them, we were no longer strangers. I dissembled, they dissembled. The more they were like me, the more I’d learn to accept and perhaps grow to like who I was. My hunches, my insights were nothing more than furtive ways of bridging the insuperable distance between me and the world.