On Literature

There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.

What use is this intangible power we call literature? The obvious reply is the one I have already made, namely, that it is consumed for its own sake and therefore does not have to serve any purpose. But such a disembodied view of the pleasure of literature risks reducing it to the status of jogging or doing crossword puzzles—both of which primarily serve some purpose, the former the health of the body, the latter the expansion of one’s vocabulary. What I intend to discuss is therefore a series of roles that literature plays in both our individual and our social lives.

And indeed, why should we think words “allow us to see,” when they were invented precisely to speak of what is not before our eyes and what cannot be pointed at with a finger? The most words can do (since they produce emotional effects) is to lead us to imagine.

… an aphorism expresses a commonplace in a brilliant way.

Text is like a musical score. It is true that Anna Karenina commits suicide in the same sense that is true that Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is in C minor (and not in F major, like the Sixth) and begins with G,G,G,E-flat.