small epiphany
Aug. 23rd, 2003 12:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyI've just realized something.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
oursin posted this morning (well, afternoon for her) about historiography and, as she put it, "Trying to get the balance between having to leave some things out, and having to put others in. The temptation of over-simplification and binarism."
My reply to her, and tomatociquala, who had responded from the fictioneer's perspective, was a riff that anyone who was at WisCon probably heard me do, and maybe more than once, about the human need for patterns: we perceive them, we search for them, and sometimes we by-god MAKE them.
And I was thinking about that, and about my recent biography kick and all the rereading I've been doing lately, and about the shelf and a half of unread books I've got, some of which have been waiting to be read since Minicon, and I realized what has happened: I've gone off narrative.
I can't imagine this is a permanent state of affairs, since my narrative-CREATING impulse is certainly not on the fritz, but it does explain why I have all these books I sincerely want to read, and yet I can't bring myself to pick them up. I can't face the work of reading the narrative. With biographies (especially of people like Wilde and George Eliot, whom I already knew at least a little bit about), you know how it ends: the hero dies. And because it's history, there's a limit to the number of unexpected things that can happen. I'm LEARNING as I read, but I'm not being asked to invest in the reading in the same way that a novel asks one to invest. I just can't deal at the moment with having to learn a new pattern, or, for a different metaphor, having to start across a bridge when I can't see the other end.
I'm probably really not making sense with this at all. But it helps for me to know that there's a reason (even if a strange and neurotic one) that I'm not reading that huge stack of books. And maybe once the dissertation's done, I'll have the energy for new narratives again.
oursin posted this morning (well, afternoon for her) about historiography and, as she put it, "Trying to get the balance between having to leave some things out, and having to put others in. The temptation of over-simplification and binarism."My reply to her, and to
matociquala, who had responded from the fictioneer's perspective, was a riff that anyone who was at WisCon probably heard me do, and maybe more than once, about the human need for patterns: we perceive them, we search for them, and sometimes we by-god MAKE them.And I was thinking about that, and about my recent biography kick and all the rereading I've been doing lately, and about the shelf and a half of unread books I've got, some of which have been waiting to be read since Minicon, and I realized what has happened: I've gone off narrative.
I can't imagine this is a permanent state of affairs, since my narrative-CREATING impulse is certainly not on the fritz, but it does explain why I have all these books I sincerely want to read, and yet I can't bring myself to pick them up. I can't face the work of reading the narrative. With biographies (especially of people like Wilde and George Eliot, whom I already knew at least a little bit about), you know how it ends: the hero dies. And because it's history, there's a limit to the number of unexpected things that can happen. I'm LEARNING as I read, but I'm not being asked to invest in the reading in the same way that a novel asks one to invest. I just can't deal at the moment with having to learn a new pattern, or, for a different metaphor, having to start across a bridge when I can't see the other end.
I'm probably really not making sense with this at all. But it helps for me to know that there's a reason (even if a strange and neurotic one) that I'm not reading that huge stack of books. And maybe once the dissertation's done, I'll have the energy for new narratives again.
