Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
The ravens hawking from tree to tree, not you, not you,
Is all that the world allows, and all one could wish for.
Charles WrightThat element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotions of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.
George EliotThe hardest thing in the world is not to be you. Literature tests out the difficulty and challenges it. However self-preoccupied we become, however much our fictions call out to us as commentaries on ourselves, or as more or less fantastic reflections of the writers themselves, literature demands an exercise of the aesthetic and ethical imagination that gives us the rare opportunity not to be us. The experience of entering mentally into the strange terrain of otherness, of overhearing other selves, opens up alternatives to ourselves. It is like hearing the ravens hawking from tree to tree announcing their absolute difference, announcing a world you never made, that runs without reference to you, that is full of beings that don't know of you, who guide their lives unconcerned about whether you find them beautiful or annoying or even irrelevant.
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- Information
- Realism, Ethics and SecularismEssays on Victorian Literature and Science, pp. 1 - 22Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008