Life and Literature

From the sublime to the debased, literature works as a sort of intellectual narcotic: it calms, it soothes, it incites . . . and it certainly excites. Literature operates like music. It creates a mood. It evokes a feeling. It plays endless notes in our minds, using our inner thoughts as sounds and language as the finely honed artistic instrument.

We tell myths, legends, stories, for salvation-redemption, for inspiration and enlightenment, for a great many human purposes: to laugh, to cry, to look into the future and yet never to neglect the past. To bring eternal hope. To express sorrow and sadness. To live vicariously, to escape into another world, into another time and place–to become someone else, a hero; or to reflect introspectively, about who we are and what we are all about.

Through both poetry and prose–through fiction–we gaze upon our inner souls; we stare down at a stark abyss or revel–intoxicated, mesmerized, enthralled–high atop a mountain’s peak. We experience life. We express longing, pining, yearning, angst–and, yes, even despair, death and nihilism.

Through words–through the artfully crafted language depicting an idealized world–we may wonder in grand amazement, at the deep springs of life. We may indulge in a collective nostalgia, relish a cultural heritage, or celebrate an historical legacy in various traditions. Literature enables us to do all of this and more.

Literature is a tool for coping, for understanding and for celebrating. It reflects, ponders and affirms the various issues of life: hate, jealousy, rage, revenge; as well as hope, opportunity, and love. Indeed, Literature has been called “equipment for living.”

A poet (Ezra Pound) once referred to literature as “news that stays news,” though its ultimate purpose is not so much to record history or to mark significant historical, cultural or social transitions, the way an objective reporter would. Literature’s ultimate aim, instead, is to capture “a sense of life”–to convey a sense of living, or of having lived. It shows what is possible in this world–what is open to man’s vast experience, either positive or negative.

Literature is a subjective odyssey, a journey of intellectual discovery. Man reads to find his own inner truth, his inner self–to discover himself in relation to others, to history, to the present, to the future….

Ayn Rand, at the conclusion of her novel, We The Living, wrote the following passage:

She lay on the edge of a hill and looked down at the sky. One hand, white and still, hung over the edge, and little red drops rolled slowly in the snow, down the slope. She smiled. She knew she was dying. But it did not matter any longer. She had known something which no human words could ever tell and she knew it now. She had been awaiting it and she felt it, as if it had been, as if she had lived it. Life had been, if only because she had known it could be, and she felt it now as a hymn without sound, deep under the little hole that dripped red drops into the snow, deeper than that from which the red drops came. A moment or an eternity–did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist.

This is why we read literature: to experience moments such as this, that only fiction–idealized reality–can crystallize and capture.

The subject matter need not be a romance, an epic three-part drama: gain, loss, and ultimate redemption or vindication, as in boy meets girl, boy loses girl, and boy regains girl anew, albeit after much tragedy and travail. Literature need not be one upward surge or movement, tempered by struggles and setbacks.

It may offer up a dignity to suffering, or celebrate death as the ultimate form of nationalistic self-sacrifice, as Yukio Mishima achieves in Patriotism. We may even be dealing with farce and comedy–or farce tinged with tragedy, as Shakespeare manages with unrivaled genius.

Literature is life, and life is literature: part history, part entertainment, part wonder, part morality, part culture, part philosophy, part truth . . . but always life, in one form or another, through the travail of ages.