I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers
A writer apologizes to his English teachers for dismissing great literature as a hoax, after discovering 'thickness'—art that rewards attention—through Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights. He explores what makes art thick, from the butt music's hidden warning to Hokusai's iterative process, and argues that thickness is the essence separating true art from mere objects.
But thickness is tricky, because rewarding the careful reader often means repelling the casual one.
- lordnacho
As an old man I now think the art and humanities classes in school landed at the wrong time.
You need context to really understand a book or a work of art. You want to know what kind of environment produced it, what it's talking to.
But when you're in school, there isn't time for that. You aren't going to know a bunch of things about history to put things into context, because there simply isn't enough time for it.
So you end up doing a bunch of weird commentary on say a book where you as a teenager have no idea where to place it. Like if you read Dickens, will you know enough about the industrial revolution, the condition of cities at the time, and such? Will you know what kind of thing the characters would care about?
How would you know what the characters in Pride and Prejudice are worried about if you don't know how that society is?
So as a kid it just totally didn't mean anything to me, it was just a strange torture where you are meant to comment on the motivations of the characters and how the writing style brings that out.
- exmadscientist
> Why this word, this scene, this character, and not some other one?
The "why this not that, even when it looks like that would do just fine" style of differential analysis is an exquisitely powerful analytical tool. Asking this question is probably the single most powerful method I know of to generate deep thought, in absolutely any aspect of life. If you haven't tried it... go for it!
(Sample question: why'd I choose the word "exquisitely" in the above sentence?)
> In the short term, thinness prevails. ... The real question is not “which of these things looks nicer when you look at them for two seconds?” but “which of these things will stand the test of time?”
That tracks with another thing I've noticed I approach differently. I've recently joined a book club and everyone loves to talk about how many "stars" they gave a book. I've never really been able to rank things like that. Aside from there being no such thing as a total ordering of books (or movies or ...), who's to say what five stars from you means, compared to five stars from me? Instead I've started thinking about books in terms of "book of the month", "book of the year", "book of the decade", "book of the century", et cetera. Is this going to be the best thing I read all month or all decade? Am I going to remember this for a year or forget most of it next week? Is everyone still going to be talking about this one in 80 years? I think that's a much better scale than "one to five stars (but actually three to five s […]
- ransom_rs
If you enjoyed this you will probably enjoy Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag[0]. Great piece that discusses why and how art moves us and pushes back a bit against the idea that is presented in this post that real art is art you can ask questions about and get answers from. I think most people including the author can recognize impactful art is more than just being able to get your 'why' questions answered (some might claim modern art is about challenging these assumptions), but it is even more difficult to talk about that concept without sounding extremely snobby, and Sontag has the credentials / writing skills to discuss it well.
- mlsu
Really loved this essay, loved the irreverent style. I had a similar literary journey as this guy.
I think I would take it a step further though. It's not just that great literature has details and motifs that line up perfectly, it's not just that it took great effort to produce, or has some musicality or rhythm that is beautiful to take in experientially. It's that the thing that is communicated is truthful. Great fiction wipes away the noise of one's day-to-day thinking into some deep and essential truth about the human experience.
Which is difficult, because that type of truth is not mathematical, it cannot be arrived at through some standalone logical path. I think students suffer because instruction by its nature is framed as teaching a path to get to some destination. The author mentions this with the egg cracking metaphor. The reason that fiction can produce this type of truth and non-fiction cannot is that fiction relays a human experience, it's relational and personal and that is the whole point of it. And you get that transcendental truth out of it because our life experience is fundamentally relational, it is how we see ourselves in relation to others or god or nature or what have you.
Seeing fiction that way is the main difference between myself at 16 and myself today.
- Folcon
There's an interesting part of this that's mentioned in the comments that the original author states:
> Haha I had a section in this, but cut it, about how people jokingly suggest we should include one regular person in every Olympic event to show just how astounding Olympic athletes are, and this is also a good idea for art...
I've been getting into fiction writing a bit recently and learning to focus on incremental improvement is necessary, for example, getting feedback and trying to find good venues to get it is a challenge because getting helpful constructive feedback is hard
I'm beginning to wonder if, because the skill level of the creators of media the average person consumes on a regular basis is so high, it's actually difficult to get good feedback for learning from by asking them until you get to a minimum baseline of skill and improvement is constrained by finding environments that can provide high quality feedback
- frereubu
The best thing about gaining an appreciation of this aspect of life is it opens up so many extra pleasures. I can spend an entire day at the (free entry!) V&A in London and never be bored. Likewise with a great book (when my 11-year-old isn't around!)
- aidenn0
But when I see something incomprehensible, is it thick, or is it just stupid?
Surely the literary field has its cranks that believe they have made something deep, but have just made something nonsensical? What's the literary equivalent of TimeCube or chemtrails?
- patcon
> But those works were much more like dark, winding caves with treasure stashed inside of them. My teachers were like, “Right, well, into the cave you go!” and I was like “But there’s nothing in there” and they were like “Entering the cave is 30% of your grade” and so I took a few steps into the darkness and I was like “Just as I suspected: an empty cave” and then I came trudging back out and pretended that I saw something.
This was a nice metaphor, and made me smile :)