There is something in the act of reading that will never allow me to feel alone. I cannot divorce the words from their speaker; when I take some thought from a book or essay, I cannot be deluded into thinking it is separate from its author. To hell with Barthes, I say-- there is always something of the speaker in his words. "I am a fragment," Emerson says, "and this is a fragment of me."
And so there is a tension in "Experience" that provokes the combative in me. In certain scattered moments, Emerson announces that the very core of man is and will forever be apart: "There will be the same gulf between every me and thee, as between the original and the picture." "Two human beings are like globes, which can touch only in a point, and, whilst they remain in contact, all other points of each of the spheres are inert..." "How long before our masquerade will end its noise of tambourines, laughter, and shouting, as we shall find it was a solitary performance?" Emerson! I want to shout. I am here with you in this thought! We are reader and writer united for at least this moment, and you would have me believe I am here alone? I cannot even believe it is only at a solitary point that we meet. For the days and weeks after I read a provoking text, I feel that I carry it with me in every point of my "sphericity."
The phenomenon of the literary "I" is enough to convince me of our unity. "All I know is reception; I am and I have: but I do not get, and when I have fancied I had gotten anything, I found I did not." When I follow this closely enough, I am aligned with Emerson's "I"; it is not solely him or me, but whosoever hears this thought that lives in "I." And further, whenever Emerson speaks of loneliness or apartness, he does not use "I"-- he uses "we." I believe Emerson intends for this contradiction-- the contradiction between this "we" and its "aloneness"-- and in it I think he finds some way to reconcile the competing ideas of individuality and shared human spirit (Emerson's "One Man").
YES!!!! I LOVE THIS!!! I was literally thinking about this the other day when I read something I connected with very deeply. I once wrote a thing on living words in which said this: "Even here, in a story that could not be farther from my life, I find words of solace, probably because I seek them. Something to make things make sense, or if not sense, at least a little easier. They are everywhere, these words of camaraderie and shared experience. Living souls tucked away between pages, floating around upon radio waves, or sleeping within a hard drive just waiting for somebody to come a long and breath life into them. Every time we read somebodies words, we bring them to life in a little way. Weather they are fictional or not, whether we knew them or not."
ReplyDeleteI like how you go farther with the literary "I" though. I didn't think about that.