Notes Towards an Applied Literature
Fiction is often really much more useful than lived experience; it takes much less time, costs nothing (from the library), and comes in a manageable, orderly form. You can understand it. Experience just steamrollers over you and you begin to see what happened only years and years later, if ever. Fiction is much better than reality at providing usef
... See moreUrsula K. Le Guin • The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
In Woolf's words, it made us ask: "But why live at all”
For those who had lost religious faith, Russian literature became the place to contemplate essentially religious questions, and for those who retained
it, Russian literature became a way to revitalize it.
To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarate, and the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning it into a slumber. The other arts make no such retreat – some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, oth
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