Great writing should make you feel small (and important)

Wednesday 6/5/24

Fiction should make you feel small. What do I mean by that? Slight, belittled, insignificant? No. Work with me.

Let's say that someone you know, or used to know, has died. They lived a long life. You knew them for a part of yours. Perhaps during a formative period for you, such that when you were out of touch for a long time later, you knew they remained "out there." They were from a time well before you existed and were deep in their life by the time you came along. That doesn't mean they were old then. You might have thought of them as old at the time, but perhaps you're that age now, and you aren't old. You have a different understanding of age and time. You may understand that youth and childhood can be very different things, and though the latter passes, we may always maintain the former if we live the best that we can, or a reasonable facsimile.

The person dies and we read an account of their life. We see the specifics of what they did. Some things we know about, others we didn't. We get a sense of what they meant to others, whose lives they touched. People we don't know, whom we will never know, but to whom we're connected in this way.

We are part of a mystery of vast scope, but some things are becoming clearer as the vastness of life--for we are made aware in moments like these of just how much is out there--takes on sharper relief; which is to say, we see more of the shadows, the shapes of darkness from which some light emanates now from within, or such that we can perceive it.

The mystery is everywhere, but we're also seeing some connective strands, while realizing there are so many more out there which we've not gotten to yet. We are made to feel like we know someone more than we did, and yet as if we know so little, too, even as we're gaining knowledge at present.

We feel very small. Dwarfed. And yet, important. For our lives may be such things, too, and we are a strand in this tapestry of mystery that also contains light. Now we know more than we did, and part of what we know is what we don't know. And that knowledge is but an inkling. But at the same time, we have seen a life, we have seen that we see it in ways beyond what we think we knew, would have known, would have stopped to consider because it would not have occurred to us.

This is the best fiction. That is what it does. What it provides. That is the experience. It's none of this MFA program shit, none of this froufrou New Yorker shit, none of this Motorollah Granta shit, none of this pointless narcissism and emptiness.

The best fiction situates you in the human cosmos so that you know where you stand (and to where you may be moving), have a better idea of what you are, and what everything actually is.

It doesn't matter whether you believe in god or gods or if you don't or whatever you do or don't. It's a holy experience because it is about this world and beyond how we go about our individual ways within it.