By: Ted

Ted — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 17:04:40 +0000

There are a book’s worth of comments possible on the article. The basic critique to literature is the claim that you shouldn’t live by bread (material things) alone, but of course 99.9 % of us DO live by material things alone. You can, though, learn some things to help your own psychic life, as many of the novelists are expert psychologists—-Proust among them. About Conrad, well, in his novel “Nostromo” the protagonist, Decoud, couldn’t bear solitude and jumped out of his boat waiting for help and drowned himself. He couldn’t bear the solitude and being “alone with his thoughts.” Finally, you should remember that writing, especially poems, is a natural activity of the literate mind, akin to the reason birds sing or wolves howl at the moon—–But you should be prepared, unless you have institutional backing or lots of money, to write for your own integrity and hope that posterity recognizes what you did.

By: Arthur Plotnik

Arthur Plotnik — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 16:31:44 +0000

Okay, as Siegel says he realized in regard to “Herzog,” Saul Bellow was joking—and so, of course, is Siegel. It’s a funny piece, and who couldn’t add an example of how a great work triggered one of their own psychic crashes? When I was at the Iowa Writers Workshop, already dealing with lethal fear of failure, I made the mistake of reading Tolstoy’s classic “The Death of Ivan Ilich”—which sent me screamingly into the night at least six decades before my natural time. To my knowledge, no one ever promised that great literature was uplifting, except in the solace that comes from shared suffering. From that perspective, we could all names scores of works which, if not rocketing us through the empyrean, at least helped pull us from the edge of the abyss. Not to mention that a well wrought sentence is my particular Ecstasy.

Comments on: On The Dangers of Literature

By: Ted

By: Arthur Plotnik