Great writing is like a dance. A careful orchestration until the crescendo, leading you towards the inevitable conclusion. It reaches deep within you, resonating with thoughts and emotions you may not have even known you had. It illuminates the dark crevices and tawdry psyche inside of us all, taking a bit away as it goes. It is in this process of stealing that we get a little richer.
Art can be painful. When I play Claire de Lune, I’m lured into the labyrinth of memory. The melancholy of Married Life seeps from the piece. It feels like the composer has poured a piece of their soul into this piece, but also that the piece takes a piece of my soul with it. Great music captures emotion - a time and a place - but great writing permeates the soul. While music and art puts into words what cannot be said, writing is the precision instrument that strikes a chord with views that have lurked deep down - leaping unbidden from the depths of your soul.
Instilling this effect is difficult. Shallow writing does not elicit deep connection by the reader. I think that in some ways, great writing must cost something. To be a one sided transaction reduces it to a ridiculous parasocial relationship, and one of the most insidious kind. At least in traditional parasocial relationships, the adored stand on beaming smiles, coiffed hair, and witty banter. But to fall for someone’s insipid or easily won ideas seems to be giving your soul away for nothing.
That is not to say good writing necessitates pain. I’m not a sadist who thinks that unless the artist has put blood, sweat, and tears into a piece that it is not worth of perusal. Rather, I think that great writing examines life - the triumphs, the destitution, the anguish - and it seems that pain is an inescapable part of life. This idea is a lot to unpack though, and one I will come back to in the future. In essence, life entails pain, and to live is to suffer. It is in that suffering that we find meaning - both in glory, and in the suffering itself.
Socrates posits that “the unexamined life is not worth living” during his trial for impiety and corrupting youth, and it seems like that in great writing, life both needs to be lived, as well as examined. There are certain pieces of literature that I come back to again and again, and each time I do, I read them differently. Life colours them; shading in the rough edges, starkly shifting others in my heart. Great writing is not an invention, but rather, a reflection. It is best used as a mirror, to hold your life up against, to see yourselves in the characters. Writing can be powerful for aesthetic and narrative reasons, but great writing simply shows you yourself and takes a bit of you with it for good measure.
I read a quote a long time ago about explanations (I think it was David Deutsch’s “Beginning of Infinity”), and when discussing “good” explanations, David describes them as explanations, once discovered, you wonder how could ever have been otherwise. The beauty, sophistication, and simplicity of a good argument is so alluring that it’s hard to imagine thinking otherwise. It feels more like discovery rather than invention. Great writing has this quality. It elucidates something that we have known all along, we just needed it to be said in the right way. We are like hopeless romantics frozen under the trepid sky.
Great writing is beautiful in its simplicity. It is disarming. Like a confidence man, it dazzles you with its grace and beauty only to liberate you of your wallet and leave you dishevelled and quietly bemused. As it steals away, you will be forever beholden, always wondering. It revisits you every now and again, when you need it, taking a bit of you with it each time, leaving you slightly different, bobbing in its wake.