I majored in literature because words, characters,
stories and rhetoric (oh, the rhetoric!) make my brain tingle and spark like
nothing else. I developed an insatiable thirst for the aha moment ─ that
beautiful fraction of a millisecond where your brain instantaneously and
miraculously adjusts to the light. I am continually trying to achieve that
first high, like the first time I read Swift and knew satire, brilliant,
deliciously smarmy satire.
In accordance with the Orwellian thought, I view words as the conduit between floating pictures and a critical engagement with the world. Orwell was fixated with the notion that vocabulary and consciousness were inexorably linked ─ limiting one limits the other. In 1984, he writes about "newspeak" and how with its advent "every year, fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller." Though we are not existing in a dystopian society in Orwell's mind, (but I don't want to rule anything out...) the argument stands and places appropriate emphasis as to the paramount importance of words and their contribution to our reality.
The reality we construct for ourselves is flimsy at best, and feeling disassociated with my reality was simultaneously the best and worst thing that happened to me. Daylight prickled the skin in an uncanny, unreal way. I saw the whole of humanity spread on an endless tapestry of fruitless attempts to deny and overcome our plight.
A lonely place but lovely none the less; what is paradise without purgatory? What is reality without the surreal? How can you truly know beauty and authenticity without seeing the ugliness and the triviality? How can you find purpose without first accepting your banal plight? The novelty of that "knowledge" wears off though and it left me suddenly so irrevocably and totally alone.
In literature though I met minds asking the same questions and grappling with the same "truths" and suddenly my world was not so lonely anymore; there were others occupying the same lonely space as me.
In the pages of Faulkner, Chopin, Twain and McCarthy, I found my mind. Nestled in the darkness and radiance and balanced between nihility and sublimity, I realized that words allow me to see myself; the swirling chaos of thought, the irrelevance and flimsiness of reality, incredibly becomes a little more tangible.
In accordance with the Orwellian thought, I view words as the conduit between floating pictures and a critical engagement with the world. Orwell was fixated with the notion that vocabulary and consciousness were inexorably linked ─ limiting one limits the other. In 1984, he writes about "newspeak" and how with its advent "every year, fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller." Though we are not existing in a dystopian society in Orwell's mind, (but I don't want to rule anything out...) the argument stands and places appropriate emphasis as to the paramount importance of words and their contribution to our reality.
The reality we construct for ourselves is flimsy at best, and feeling disassociated with my reality was simultaneously the best and worst thing that happened to me. Daylight prickled the skin in an uncanny, unreal way. I saw the whole of humanity spread on an endless tapestry of fruitless attempts to deny and overcome our plight.
A lonely place but lovely none the less; what is paradise without purgatory? What is reality without the surreal? How can you truly know beauty and authenticity without seeing the ugliness and the triviality? How can you find purpose without first accepting your banal plight? The novelty of that "knowledge" wears off though and it left me suddenly so irrevocably and totally alone.
In literature though I met minds asking the same questions and grappling with the same "truths" and suddenly my world was not so lonely anymore; there were others occupying the same lonely space as me.
In the pages of Faulkner, Chopin, Twain and McCarthy, I found my mind. Nestled in the darkness and radiance and balanced between nihility and sublimity, I realized that words allow me to see myself; the swirling chaos of thought, the irrelevance and flimsiness of reality, incredibly becomes a little more tangible.
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