I have a very dear friend that refuses to write scholarly articles in the normal way. He prefers to write in the form of an essay – more like thinking out loud than like pretending to think through a thesis. This mode of writing is very confusing because it requires a great deal of patience if it is to be understood. My friend is of the opinion that books are the most complicated things to talk about because it really is like trying to understand another human being. What does this mean?
Plays, dialogues, and treatises are all of a different character, yet we strive to understand what they mean, i.e. we try to describe them with words other than the author’s. We say
Hamlet is Shakespeare’s attempt to work through the meaning of life through the lens of a mind isolated by protestant or skeptic assumptions. We say the
Phaedrus is the attempt to understand how human beings think about themselves in the act of writing like Plato is writing. We say Locke’s
Essay on Human Understanding is the most successful tract for modern man because he single handedly transforms the human mind from an organic tradition of thinking into a blank slate of simple and complex ideas. But
Hamlet,
Phaedrus, and the
Essay (popular books get nicknames) are also much much more. How do we say anything about books without demeaning them? How do we write about what we think a book is about without leaving out almost everything about the book?
My friend has a hunch that writing a story about a story involves submitting to it. The “story” is inexorably tied to the “meaning” of the story. Most people (even serious curious people) avoid such a dilemma by separating – e.g. by speaking of the rhetoric and substance of a work. What does Shakespeare say? What does Shakespeare mean? What does Locke say? What is the nerve of Locke’s argument? How does a writer convey a complicated topic in a way that is understandable to others? Most of us approach books in this way. Most of us separate books into two, but not my friend.
Do you see the dilemma? My friend is correct – we can’t separate Hamlet from
Hamlet and still have
Hamlet!
But my friend is wrong – if we can’t divide books into two, then we can’t say anything about them. The seeker – all curious readers are seekers – would have to write an essay on “
Hamlet” that would be identical to
Hamlet or (per impossible) superior to
Hamlet. The self-reflector – all seekers are self-reflectors – would have to write a dialogue about writing dialogues about understanding the
Phaedrus.
These are simple observations about reading books and understanding books, but they lead to complex problems. It is impossible to understand books. What does my friend do in this situation? He presses forward. Every essay he writes is better, but more complicated than the next. Every essay he writes is a sometimes excruciating exercise in self-discovery/book-discovery because he is more aware than anyone I know that is impossible to say coherent things about books without being incoherent about the book itself. But if these things are true (even if they are close to being true) why does my friend press forward with writing? He sees the impossibility (of understanding other minds) but then why does he write?
There may be no way to know … in the way we think we know things. Perhaps my friend’s solution to reading and writing is precisely the trick. Wait! Is it possible that books are only inaccessible if we try to know them in the way we think we can know them? What if “knowing” is not what we think we know it is?
It is a beautiful solution indeed. Because we are aware of the inaccessible character of books and friends we can indeed probe deeper into them. We can engage them and re-engage them and something begins to happen. We begin to know them in a deeper way … we begin to love them in a deeper way. We submit to the story and then describe it. We submit to the story again and describe it better. We keep doing this long enough and we will begin to know them. But it turns out that this “knowing” is not what we think it is … it is something much higher, less stale, more profitable. But what is this new “knowing” and what can we “know”? This is precisely my friend’s question and precisely why he keeps reading, writing, and discovering.
