Haha, I replied to the note first before seeing COMC on the list! I also put off Pride and Prejudice for a long time, even though my wife adores it. I finally read it and think it’s great too!
In Girard’s book on Shakespeare, specifically on Much Ado About Nothing, he discusses “true love” as a subject of trash literature, which great authors learn to get past. One character is consumed with possessing another, who is repelled. The object of love runs away, either because they have an excited live of themselves that gets excited by the lover, or because they see in the lover a dangerous process that is focused not on achieving some sort of reciprocal concern, but instead on the lover taking over the identity of his object.
I think I read for many years with this Romantic lie in mind, in that I saw all literature as stories of great feelings being repulsed and then revealed later as heroic and true. I expected my great desire to become revealed as truth and honesty and others would want it.
I think this is true much of the time when we try to sell our art and the consequence is mostly desperation and deception on our part.
Haha, I replied to the note first before seeing COMC on the list! I also put off Pride and Prejudice for a long time, even though my wife adores it. I finally read it and think it’s great too!
In Girard’s book on Shakespeare, specifically on Much Ado About Nothing, he discusses “true love” as a subject of trash literature, which great authors learn to get past. One character is consumed with possessing another, who is repelled. The object of love runs away, either because they have an excited live of themselves that gets excited by the lover, or because they see in the lover a dangerous process that is focused not on achieving some sort of reciprocal concern, but instead on the lover taking over the identity of his object.
I think I read for many years with this Romantic lie in mind, in that I saw all literature as stories of great feelings being repulsed and then revealed later as heroic and true. I expected my great desire to become revealed as truth and honesty and others would want it.
I think this is true much of the time when we try to sell our art and the consequence is mostly desperation and deception on our part.