A follow-up to yesterday’s post featuring Ursula Le Guin’s thoughts on writing — this one is from Sasha Chapin’s newsletter:
It’s obvious that most books aren’t efficient information transfer devices. There are few people who have 300 pages of compelling information to share with you, and, even if they do, what are the odds that you, in particular, need to hear those 300 pages of information? And what are the odds that you will retain all of it?
This is not that important to me, however. I agree that most books aren’t worth reading. But not for this reason. Books aren’t information transfer devices, they are subjectivity-merging devices.
When you read a book, you aren’t just accessing a series of propositions. You are becoming immersed in a worldview, through the rhythms of a given prose style, the facts selected and omitted, and the author’s chosen self-disclosures. Reading is hypnosis. Just like hypnotists lead you into a trance in which a simple suggestion can become forceful, skillful writers, by absorbing you in their pages, give you a perspective, from which certain selected facts take on greater relevance.
A good book doesn’t usually give you a hundred pieces of valuable information. (Is there such a thing, unless you’re actively engaging in some focused research project?) Instead, a good book gives you, maybe, 2-12 impressions that you absorb deeply because they make sense within the book’s frame. It’s like a conversation with a close friend or mentor, in which, due to a progressively cocreated intimacy, a quickly-said platitude, or a couple of relatively banal words, can have a life-changing impact.
Here’s one concern I have about what I’m doing in this newsletter: maybe in our focus on excerpting, the texts somehow lose part of their meaning. The act of excerpting feels like robbing the author, and the reader, of all the necessary work that builds up to a mere few sentences that, only in the context of what has come before, and the psychological environment it begets, can have had a full impact. It’s like skipping to the best scene in a movie — interesting, perhaps, but also somewhat meaningless without the context of all that’s come before.
I still find these excerpts personally valuable, so I’m going to keep sharing them, but it’s worth bearing in mind all that is lost in this format.