One of my high school English teachers got this point across to us in such an effective way! All year we read 'great' books, discussed, analyzed, wrote essays, etc. Then with about a month left, we read a thriller that was on the best seller lists at the time, had been for months. The teacher presented it as both an opportunity to read something we (the students) would be more likely to approach with enthusiasm, and to apply our new analytic abilities to something more recent.
As you can imagine, we all started out with happy anticipation. Deflated so quickly. It was, of course, dreck. We came to class and said so. The teacher had us tell him WHY it was dreck, what was different from the (highly varied) books we'd been reading the rest of the year, what made it so ... disappointing. We analyzed that dreck as hard as we had the 'classics'.
An invaluable lesson.
And on that note, a couple of years ago I finally read 'Middlemarch'. OMG! Why did I wait so long! I've already re-read it once.
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...
"But this is an illusion. The ideas are not already good. They need to be thickened."
1000% yes.
In my own experience of art-making (fiction and music), the initiating ideas in and of themselves are not only insufficient until I've done the work of constructing and communicating them, but they aren't even really all that clearly "mine." The best things I've made started with ideas that just sort of popped into my mind while I was falling asleep or something like that. The whole process of execution is the part that I really have organized conscious agency over. That process is where I figure out how to make it compelling and rewarding for others, but it's also where I figure out for myself just what the "idea" really is. It's a remarkable process, simultaneously self-discovering and connective. Basically every other creative person I know feels the same way. The pitch that we could outsource that part of the work is simply not tempting at all.
Don't get me wrong here because this is another great post from one of my favorite current writers... And I'm sure Adam knows what I'm about to say it just maybe didn't fit into his narrative.
There is no way to prepare adolescence for thickness or art. Appreciation of art is an acquired taste, and it doesn't come from looking at art, it comes from living through the ups and downs of life, which kids at the starting line have no awareness of...
This is why so many of us feel just like Adam does about art when we're young. We assume it's all pretentious snobbery because that is an aspect of life many of us have come to understand even when we're still young.
And some of us, even after we are old, still think half of of the noise made about art is nothing but pretentious snobbery...
I agree it's acquired, but I think you can acquire it faster or more completely, if you so choose. I think of a world where no one drinks nice wine––if you ever had a taste of it, you'd probably spit it out and never try it again. The whole reason people acquire a taste for it is they see other people drinking it and assume, consciously or not, that there must be something to it. I think there's a similar effect for art appreciation.
I think you're right that a lot of good art can only be understood by people who have had some life experience. (For instance, my friend Ethan argues we shouldn't make teenagers read The Great Gatsby because it's really a novel about turning 30: https://www.mod171.com/p/book-review-the-great-gatsby). But young people have their own kinds of experiences, and there's no reason they can't appreciate art that speaks to what they know.
Yes, there are some works of art I was exposed to as a child, didn’t like, but rediscovered in adulthood and loved. Shakespeare for example. There are others I hated as a child, revisited decades later, and hated still; The Great Gatsby, and Catcher in the Rye. And some I loved both times, like The Hobbit. A little seasoning and life does help.
But there are also 'thick' pieces of art that can draw in even the most callow of youth. I so loved many of the classic novels I was forced to read in high school, and sought out many others during those years. (STILL hate Dickens, though ....) Ditto with being entranced by some pieces of music, some paintings.
Others I only came to appreciate with time and experience.
Yet I loved Dickens in High School and afterwards. I remember being amazed that he wrote his book basically in a newspaper, section by section. I loved how he crafted a paragraph. Ah well, to each their own...
Appreciation of thick art may be possible to acquire...but I think history has shown us that it is likely more genetic than anything else...or more "forced" by conditions surrounding childhood. EXAMPLE: as a 10-year-old boy, I became obsessed with Gustav Mahler's 7th Symphony. I'd sit on the floor for hours listening to a vinyl recording of it through headphones, literally tripping out to it. This was bizarre, possibly even just wrong for a 10-year-old-boy to do! Why was I drawn to Mahler's 7th Symphony? I have no clue...and if my own son exhibited the same behavior I'd tell him to get his ass outside and climb a tree! (As it turned out, there was value in that obsession—I went on to graduate from The Juilliard School as a musician.)
I'm not sure to what extent it was snobbery that ruined the reading of literature or if it was simply the need to find something to set examination papers on.
You say, "If you allow for the existence of secret treasures that can only be accessed with effort and analysis,..." But why the effort and analysis? What are the effort and analysis for, except to create exam questions? It certainly isn't to enhance the joy of reading the work. For most people, it sucks the joy out of the experience completely.
Consider a walk in the woods. A walk in the woods is a thick experience. It abounds with life, sound, air, and light. But the pleasure of walking in the woods, the thickness of the experience, does not consist in cataloging every leaf and tree, every flying, creeping, or slithering thing. It consists in the thickness of the experience as a whole. To analyze it is to take that thickness, slice it up, and spread it thin. That may be a fascinating exercise in its own right, but there are a thousand people who would rather just enjoy the thickness of a walk in the woods without the analysis.
The same is true for books. You can't teach the thickness of the experience of a book, or, at least, you cannot write an exam question about it. And so you cannot teach a book without turning the experience from one kind, the thick kind, to another kind, the thin kind. It is the difference between playing with a kitten and dissecting one.
And that is perhaps why people today seem to prefer thin books. They have been taught that the thick books that they might have enjoyed as a thick experience must, instead, be analyzed into a tortuously long thin experience, and one stripped of all the ordinary joys of story. Again, it is like trying to teach people to love animals by taking them to an abattoir.
There are many things in this world that you cannot study without destroying them. Literature is one of them. Which is not an argument against studying literature for those who delight in it. But it is a caution against ruining the experience of literature for ordinary people, ordinary children in particular, by forcing that esoteric study down their throats at an impressionable age.
Analysis doesn't have to be academic. I don't think the person enjoying the walk through the woods is merely thinking to themselves "how nice!" over and over again, like an automaton of pleasure. They notice the birds, the rustling leaves, the dappled light. They do not have to think of the DNA or the sound waves or the wavelengths to appreciate these things––they might think of what the birds do at night, when no one is looking, or how this walk is different from the one they took when they were a child, or whether this woods will exist in a hundred years. Some of these thoughts might be explicit and verbal, and some might be feelings and images, but regardless the "enjoyment" is mediated by some kind of mental activity.
Similarly, you can take a great novel and try to diagram its sentences and chart out its plot, you can root around for its metaphors and themes, or you can just give it your full attention and see what happens. But it still requires some buy-in; you're not going to get what it has to give if you simply drag your eyes across all the words in order.
Well, yes, they notice the birds, the rustling leaves, the dappled light. And yes, they do not have to think of the DNA or the sound waves, etc. They might think about all kinds of things. And no two people will think of exactly the same things. And yes, all of this is mediated by some kind of mental activity.
But none of that adds up to analysis of the experience itself, nor yet an analysis of the environment in which those things happen. Analysis is a qualitatively different kind of mental activity. It is one which some people find delightful, which they cannot help but do as part of any experience they have. It can become such an ingrained habit that they cannot imagine any other way of enjoying things.
Perhaps it is the case that when one is older and has read many novels, one ceases to get much joy out of simply dragging one's eyes across the words in order (though that is not a fair characterization, because it is the story, not the words, that engage the reader). Perhaps then one has to resort to a different and more analytical mode of reading in order to extract any interest or enjoyment from the experience. (This seems to be true of me, by the way, to my profound regret.) But that is not a superior way to read. It is a last desperate attempt to extract pleasure out of an activity that once gave its pleasures simply and fully and without conscious effort.
But the analytical method is not how most people enjoy most things, especially when they are young, and the world is new. As a mode of enjoyment, it is perhaps one that develops later in life when the hard, sharp joys of novelty are no longer to be found. The folly is to imagine that this development represents a superior kind of enjoyment that ought to be given to the young, as if we expected a six-year-old to dine like a sixty-year-old. Each pleasure in its own time.
I think you're confusing the study of mechanics with the analysis of the art. Learning how literary devices or story structure works would be analogous to cutting up an animal. But looking at themes and characters and what the story makes you feel is engaging with it the way one would play with a live animal.
Otoh people don't necessarily want to be forced to play with an animal either, even if it's a fun activity they often choose to do.
Well, the analogy is not perfect. A veterinary student would study both live animals and dead ones. Both of these activities would be analytical in nature. But neither one of them is like playing with the animal. Play is not analytical. Play does not break things down into categories and take notes.
Similarly, with a story, if you analyze the feeling you get from a book, you are no longer playing with it, and you won't get the feeling that you are trying to analyze. Most readers don't want to analyze; they just want to have the feeling. Some will read once, have the feeling, ask themselves how that feeling was produced, and read again to figure it out, at which point they won't have the same feeling again; they will have the feelings that come with successful analysis or frustrated analysis. Which is fine if you are the sort of person who asks that kind of question about their feelings.
The problem is that when a book is studied in a classroom, the students read it once and do so in analytical mode. Except now they have not had the feelings themselves, because they are working from a checklist of feelings to look for provided by their teacher. So they are trying to explain a phenomenon they have not experienced. No wonder they find the experience off-putting.
So yes, we might say that there are three modes of reading: that of the writer wanting to understand the mechanics so they can apply it to their own work, that of the literary critic wanting to understand the effects, and that of the reader who simply wants to enjoy the effects.
The problem remains that schools take those who might become readers and teach them to read either as the writer reads or as the critic reads, not as the reader reads. And that makes them dislike reading.
I have found it to be true, however, that writers generally understand this distinction, because they often find that reading like a writer ruins reading for them, but that critics almost universally do not understand it and sincerely believe that they have discovered a superior way of reading that ought to be taught to every eight-year-old.
With cars, we have a similar breakdown. There are car designers, mechanics, and drivers. But it's as if the mechanics were all convinced that you cannot enjoy a Sunday drive in the country if you don't know your car's compression ratio and spark plug gaps. Thus, they have turned driver's ed into shop class. Nobody goes anywhere, but they bruise their knuckles and get covered in oil.
I know that the lovers of literary analysis are perfectly sincere in their belief that everyone should read the way they do, and that they would enjoy literature much more if they did. But they have turned generation after generation off reading, and until they learn the folly of their approach, they are going to go on turning generations to come off reading as well.
It may be, by the way, that readers do become more analytical as they age. Part of aging is that one tends to feel things less keenly than one did in youth, and at a certain point of aging one notices this and begins to inquire into the nature and effects of the feeling that we no longer experience so strongly. Some will then discover a different kind of joy in understanding how the feeling is produced. I suppose it is natural that they will think that they have found a pearl of great price and want to give it to their children. But their children are not ready for it. They still feel things with all the force and novelty of youth. You don't offer a crutch to a person with two healthy young legs. It will just slow them down and spoil the joy of running.
When we are young, we find joy in playing. When we are old, we sit on a bench and find joy in watching the children play. But it would be an act of folly and cruelty for the old to force the young to sit on the bench and watch the other children play, and to discuss why they enjoy the slides instead of going down them again and again. Yet this is exactly how English teachers ruin reading. We have to find a way to make them realize what they are doing and make them stop.
Your comments here are some of the best things I've read in weeks, you should try getting them published as a short article somewhere so I can cite it and send it to English teachers if the subject ever comes up.
In your "walk in the woods" analogy, effort and analysis is more the equivalent of: you're walking along and hear some birds. You decide to stop, walk closer and investigate the noise, and in doing so, discover there's a nest with three baby chicks. This is wonderful. Next time you go on the same walk, and hear the same sound, you have extra context and appreciation for what that particular bird sound represents, enriching your walk beyond what it originally was.
Or you hear a woodpecker. At home you do some research and learn woodpeckers can peck at 20-40 strikes per second. Wow, that's incredible! Next time you hear the woodpecker on the walk, it's an even more exciting experience.
I don't see how delving deeper in this way makes the experience thinner. If anything, your analogy proves the point.
Yes, all of that can happen. The question is, does it happen spontaneously or is it forced? Because if you discover all that be yourself, that is a thick experience. But if you are sent into the woods with a list of things to find and be graded on, that will be a thin experience. Allow the spontaneous delight of discovery to occur, and some, students, at least, may come back of their own volition. Try to force it and analyze it and you will kill the experience even for those who might have found delight in it.
Wow! I almost shed tears after reading this. I kept feeling that something was wrong with some of the articles I have been reading in recent years. You read them and just think, “Nice.” But you still feel as though something is amiss. Clearly, they have the right titles, every paragraph is well polished, but there is still this loneliness I feel after reading them. Now I have the words for it - they’re simply so thin, whereas we like ’em thick.
Agreed on the thickness. The instruction I never got was how long to stay. I live in Florence and watch people meet a fresco at the pace of a corridor, four seconds and a photograph, and they are not being lazy. Nobody has told them that twenty minutes in front of one thing is a normal amount of time. School had the same silence in it. You were marked on having been in the cave, never on how long you stood there in the dark. The boredom is the entry fee. Nobody says so, and people take it as proof the cave is empty.
I’ve been checking articles on Substack for AI ratings and have been surprised that when I asked those who got a 100% AI rating to respond to it, not one person actually responded, which said it all. Being “thick” requires unique human effort that AI cannot equal. Nowadays, I can almost predict which ones are going to be 100% AI or those who don’t allow the AI rating to exist. I believe that AI generated content sounds too Spock-like: perfectly logical, but lacking the raw, unfiltered, emotional part of living.
Thank you for your wisdom!!! This is the exact experience I had with Waiting for Godot.
First time: High school, hated it
Second time: College. Learned about the set design, the theater of the absurd movement. OK I could appreciate what it did, historically.
Third time: in French for French class. Learned Beckett wrote the play in French first, then translated to English, to add that degree of removal, distance. I was like ok this play is cool actually.
Fourth time: saw it on broadway with Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart. Loved it. Waiting for Godot super fan.
I had this experience seeing Shakespeare on stage for the first time. "Oh, the words have *meanings*!" People are saying them as if they are...communicating with one another! This isn't just a bunch of old-timey words strung together randomly!
On the topic of separating sloppy prose from thick ones, you always keep churning out all timers, Adam. Thank you so much once again for articulating ideas I've thought about and long forgotten because I couldn't turn them into words.
Delightful essay. I particularly liked the Betty Crocker crack-an-egg metaphor, and the “bicycle shaped object”. Both of which I will steal. And I take great comfort from your point that slip will not last, because it is slop. It just evaporates.
One of my high school English teachers got this point across to us in such an effective way! All year we read 'great' books, discussed, analyzed, wrote essays, etc. Then with about a month left, we read a thriller that was on the best seller lists at the time, had been for months. The teacher presented it as both an opportunity to read something we (the students) would be more likely to approach with enthusiasm, and to apply our new analytic abilities to something more recent.
As you can imagine, we all started out with happy anticipation. Deflated so quickly. It was, of course, dreck. We came to class and said so. The teacher had us tell him WHY it was dreck, what was different from the (highly varied) books we'd been reading the rest of the year, what made it so ... disappointing. We analyzed that dreck as hard as we had the 'classics'.
An invaluable lesson.
And on that note, a couple of years ago I finally read 'Middlemarch'. OMG! Why did I wait so long! I've already re-read it once.
(Still can't stand Charles Dickens, though ....)
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...
On the other hand, could there be forgotten best-selling books which have rightful value and are waiting to be rediscovered?
I find some nice turns of phrase in my favorite thriller writers. Maybe they’re not “thick” but they’re not dreck either.
I bet the thriller was written by Dan Brown ;)
Is Dan Brown considered dreck?
What is the non-dreck alternative to Dan Brown? because I had liked him and his novels.
I would love suggestions for thick classic books with similar genres.
Or James Patterson.
"But this is an illusion. The ideas are not already good. They need to be thickened."
1000% yes.
In my own experience of art-making (fiction and music), the initiating ideas in and of themselves are not only insufficient until I've done the work of constructing and communicating them, but they aren't even really all that clearly "mine." The best things I've made started with ideas that just sort of popped into my mind while I was falling asleep or something like that. The whole process of execution is the part that I really have organized conscious agency over. That process is where I figure out how to make it compelling and rewarding for others, but it's also where I figure out for myself just what the "idea" really is. It's a remarkable process, simultaneously self-discovering and connective. Basically every other creative person I know feels the same way. The pitch that we could outsource that part of the work is simply not tempting at all.
'Instead, I had to learn about thickness by looking at a guy’s butt.'
It's spelled 'thiccness'
My worldview is shaken having found out a self-help book misinterpreted the data!
Dude, that's some top-self sarcasm right there.
Don't get me wrong here because this is another great post from one of my favorite current writers... And I'm sure Adam knows what I'm about to say it just maybe didn't fit into his narrative.
There is no way to prepare adolescence for thickness or art. Appreciation of art is an acquired taste, and it doesn't come from looking at art, it comes from living through the ups and downs of life, which kids at the starting line have no awareness of...
This is why so many of us feel just like Adam does about art when we're young. We assume it's all pretentious snobbery because that is an aspect of life many of us have come to understand even when we're still young.
And some of us, even after we are old, still think half of of the noise made about art is nothing but pretentious snobbery...
I agree it's acquired, but I think you can acquire it faster or more completely, if you so choose. I think of a world where no one drinks nice wine––if you ever had a taste of it, you'd probably spit it out and never try it again. The whole reason people acquire a taste for it is they see other people drinking it and assume, consciously or not, that there must be something to it. I think there's a similar effect for art appreciation.
I think you're right that a lot of good art can only be understood by people who have had some life experience. (For instance, my friend Ethan argues we shouldn't make teenagers read The Great Gatsby because it's really a novel about turning 30: https://www.mod171.com/p/book-review-the-great-gatsby). But young people have their own kinds of experiences, and there's no reason they can't appreciate art that speaks to what they know.
Yes, there are some works of art I was exposed to as a child, didn’t like, but rediscovered in adulthood and loved. Shakespeare for example. There are others I hated as a child, revisited decades later, and hated still; The Great Gatsby, and Catcher in the Rye. And some I loved both times, like The Hobbit. A little seasoning and life does help.
But there are also 'thick' pieces of art that can draw in even the most callow of youth. I so loved many of the classic novels I was forced to read in high school, and sought out many others during those years. (STILL hate Dickens, though ....) Ditto with being entranced by some pieces of music, some paintings.
Others I only came to appreciate with time and experience.
Yet I loved Dickens in High School and afterwards. I remember being amazed that he wrote his book basically in a newspaper, section by section. I loved how he crafted a paragraph. Ah well, to each their own...
Appreciation of thick art may be possible to acquire...but I think history has shown us that it is likely more genetic than anything else...or more "forced" by conditions surrounding childhood. EXAMPLE: as a 10-year-old boy, I became obsessed with Gustav Mahler's 7th Symphony. I'd sit on the floor for hours listening to a vinyl recording of it through headphones, literally tripping out to it. This was bizarre, possibly even just wrong for a 10-year-old-boy to do! Why was I drawn to Mahler's 7th Symphony? I have no clue...and if my own son exhibited the same behavior I'd tell him to get his ass outside and climb a tree! (As it turned out, there was value in that obsession—I went on to graduate from The Juilliard School as a musician.)
I'm not sure to what extent it was snobbery that ruined the reading of literature or if it was simply the need to find something to set examination papers on.
You say, "If you allow for the existence of secret treasures that can only be accessed with effort and analysis,..." But why the effort and analysis? What are the effort and analysis for, except to create exam questions? It certainly isn't to enhance the joy of reading the work. For most people, it sucks the joy out of the experience completely.
Consider a walk in the woods. A walk in the woods is a thick experience. It abounds with life, sound, air, and light. But the pleasure of walking in the woods, the thickness of the experience, does not consist in cataloging every leaf and tree, every flying, creeping, or slithering thing. It consists in the thickness of the experience as a whole. To analyze it is to take that thickness, slice it up, and spread it thin. That may be a fascinating exercise in its own right, but there are a thousand people who would rather just enjoy the thickness of a walk in the woods without the analysis.
The same is true for books. You can't teach the thickness of the experience of a book, or, at least, you cannot write an exam question about it. And so you cannot teach a book without turning the experience from one kind, the thick kind, to another kind, the thin kind. It is the difference between playing with a kitten and dissecting one.
And that is perhaps why people today seem to prefer thin books. They have been taught that the thick books that they might have enjoyed as a thick experience must, instead, be analyzed into a tortuously long thin experience, and one stripped of all the ordinary joys of story. Again, it is like trying to teach people to love animals by taking them to an abattoir.
There are many things in this world that you cannot study without destroying them. Literature is one of them. Which is not an argument against studying literature for those who delight in it. But it is a caution against ruining the experience of literature for ordinary people, ordinary children in particular, by forcing that esoteric study down their throats at an impressionable age.
Analysis doesn't have to be academic. I don't think the person enjoying the walk through the woods is merely thinking to themselves "how nice!" over and over again, like an automaton of pleasure. They notice the birds, the rustling leaves, the dappled light. They do not have to think of the DNA or the sound waves or the wavelengths to appreciate these things––they might think of what the birds do at night, when no one is looking, or how this walk is different from the one they took when they were a child, or whether this woods will exist in a hundred years. Some of these thoughts might be explicit and verbal, and some might be feelings and images, but regardless the "enjoyment" is mediated by some kind of mental activity.
Similarly, you can take a great novel and try to diagram its sentences and chart out its plot, you can root around for its metaphors and themes, or you can just give it your full attention and see what happens. But it still requires some buy-in; you're not going to get what it has to give if you simply drag your eyes across all the words in order.
Well, yes, they notice the birds, the rustling leaves, the dappled light. And yes, they do not have to think of the DNA or the sound waves, etc. They might think about all kinds of things. And no two people will think of exactly the same things. And yes, all of this is mediated by some kind of mental activity.
But none of that adds up to analysis of the experience itself, nor yet an analysis of the environment in which those things happen. Analysis is a qualitatively different kind of mental activity. It is one which some people find delightful, which they cannot help but do as part of any experience they have. It can become such an ingrained habit that they cannot imagine any other way of enjoying things.
Perhaps it is the case that when one is older and has read many novels, one ceases to get much joy out of simply dragging one's eyes across the words in order (though that is not a fair characterization, because it is the story, not the words, that engage the reader). Perhaps then one has to resort to a different and more analytical mode of reading in order to extract any interest or enjoyment from the experience. (This seems to be true of me, by the way, to my profound regret.) But that is not a superior way to read. It is a last desperate attempt to extract pleasure out of an activity that once gave its pleasures simply and fully and without conscious effort.
But the analytical method is not how most people enjoy most things, especially when they are young, and the world is new. As a mode of enjoyment, it is perhaps one that develops later in life when the hard, sharp joys of novelty are no longer to be found. The folly is to imagine that this development represents a superior kind of enjoyment that ought to be given to the young, as if we expected a six-year-old to dine like a sixty-year-old. Each pleasure in its own time.
I think you're confusing the study of mechanics with the analysis of the art. Learning how literary devices or story structure works would be analogous to cutting up an animal. But looking at themes and characters and what the story makes you feel is engaging with it the way one would play with a live animal.
Otoh people don't necessarily want to be forced to play with an animal either, even if it's a fun activity they often choose to do.
Well, the analogy is not perfect. A veterinary student would study both live animals and dead ones. Both of these activities would be analytical in nature. But neither one of them is like playing with the animal. Play is not analytical. Play does not break things down into categories and take notes.
Similarly, with a story, if you analyze the feeling you get from a book, you are no longer playing with it, and you won't get the feeling that you are trying to analyze. Most readers don't want to analyze; they just want to have the feeling. Some will read once, have the feeling, ask themselves how that feeling was produced, and read again to figure it out, at which point they won't have the same feeling again; they will have the feelings that come with successful analysis or frustrated analysis. Which is fine if you are the sort of person who asks that kind of question about their feelings.
The problem is that when a book is studied in a classroom, the students read it once and do so in analytical mode. Except now they have not had the feelings themselves, because they are working from a checklist of feelings to look for provided by their teacher. So they are trying to explain a phenomenon they have not experienced. No wonder they find the experience off-putting.
So yes, we might say that there are three modes of reading: that of the writer wanting to understand the mechanics so they can apply it to their own work, that of the literary critic wanting to understand the effects, and that of the reader who simply wants to enjoy the effects.
The problem remains that schools take those who might become readers and teach them to read either as the writer reads or as the critic reads, not as the reader reads. And that makes them dislike reading.
I have found it to be true, however, that writers generally understand this distinction, because they often find that reading like a writer ruins reading for them, but that critics almost universally do not understand it and sincerely believe that they have discovered a superior way of reading that ought to be taught to every eight-year-old.
With cars, we have a similar breakdown. There are car designers, mechanics, and drivers. But it's as if the mechanics were all convinced that you cannot enjoy a Sunday drive in the country if you don't know your car's compression ratio and spark plug gaps. Thus, they have turned driver's ed into shop class. Nobody goes anywhere, but they bruise their knuckles and get covered in oil.
I know that the lovers of literary analysis are perfectly sincere in their belief that everyone should read the way they do, and that they would enjoy literature much more if they did. But they have turned generation after generation off reading, and until they learn the folly of their approach, they are going to go on turning generations to come off reading as well.
It may be, by the way, that readers do become more analytical as they age. Part of aging is that one tends to feel things less keenly than one did in youth, and at a certain point of aging one notices this and begins to inquire into the nature and effects of the feeling that we no longer experience so strongly. Some will then discover a different kind of joy in understanding how the feeling is produced. I suppose it is natural that they will think that they have found a pearl of great price and want to give it to their children. But their children are not ready for it. They still feel things with all the force and novelty of youth. You don't offer a crutch to a person with two healthy young legs. It will just slow them down and spoil the joy of running.
When we are young, we find joy in playing. When we are old, we sit on a bench and find joy in watching the children play. But it would be an act of folly and cruelty for the old to force the young to sit on the bench and watch the other children play, and to discuss why they enjoy the slides instead of going down them again and again. Yet this is exactly how English teachers ruin reading. We have to find a way to make them realize what they are doing and make them stop.
Your comments here are some of the best things I've read in weeks, you should try getting them published as a short article somewhere so I can cite it and send it to English teachers if the subject ever comes up.
In your "walk in the woods" analogy, effort and analysis is more the equivalent of: you're walking along and hear some birds. You decide to stop, walk closer and investigate the noise, and in doing so, discover there's a nest with three baby chicks. This is wonderful. Next time you go on the same walk, and hear the same sound, you have extra context and appreciation for what that particular bird sound represents, enriching your walk beyond what it originally was.
Or you hear a woodpecker. At home you do some research and learn woodpeckers can peck at 20-40 strikes per second. Wow, that's incredible! Next time you hear the woodpecker on the walk, it's an even more exciting experience.
I don't see how delving deeper in this way makes the experience thinner. If anything, your analogy proves the point.
Yes, all of that can happen. The question is, does it happen spontaneously or is it forced? Because if you discover all that be yourself, that is a thick experience. But if you are sent into the woods with a list of things to find and be graded on, that will be a thin experience. Allow the spontaneous delight of discovery to occur, and some, students, at least, may come back of their own volition. Try to force it and analyze it and you will kill the experience even for those who might have found delight in it.
Wow! I almost shed tears after reading this. I kept feeling that something was wrong with some of the articles I have been reading in recent years. You read them and just think, “Nice.” But you still feel as though something is amiss. Clearly, they have the right titles, every paragraph is well polished, but there is still this loneliness I feel after reading them. Now I have the words for it - they’re simply so thin, whereas we like ’em thick.
Agreed on the thickness. The instruction I never got was how long to stay. I live in Florence and watch people meet a fresco at the pace of a corridor, four seconds and a photograph, and they are not being lazy. Nobody has told them that twenty minutes in front of one thing is a normal amount of time. School had the same silence in it. You were marked on having been in the cave, never on how long you stood there in the dark. The boredom is the entry fee. Nobody says so, and people take it as proof the cave is empty.
I subscribed to you because almost all of your essays are thick in exactly the way you describe. This one, especially so.
I’ve been checking articles on Substack for AI ratings and have been surprised that when I asked those who got a 100% AI rating to respond to it, not one person actually responded, which said it all. Being “thick” requires unique human effort that AI cannot equal. Nowadays, I can almost predict which ones are going to be 100% AI or those who don’t allow the AI rating to exist. I believe that AI generated content sounds too Spock-like: perfectly logical, but lacking the raw, unfiltered, emotional part of living.
one of the best things i've read on this platform in months. kudos!
Thank you for your wisdom!!! This is the exact experience I had with Waiting for Godot.
First time: High school, hated it
Second time: College. Learned about the set design, the theater of the absurd movement. OK I could appreciate what it did, historically.
Third time: in French for French class. Learned Beckett wrote the play in French first, then translated to English, to add that degree of removal, distance. I was like ok this play is cool actually.
Fourth time: saw it on broadway with Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart. Loved it. Waiting for Godot super fan.
I had this experience seeing Shakespeare on stage for the first time. "Oh, the words have *meanings*!" People are saying them as if they are...communicating with one another! This isn't just a bunch of old-timey words strung together randomly!
And, your article got a 100% human rating and 0% AI! You’ve made your point!
On the topic of separating sloppy prose from thick ones, you always keep churning out all timers, Adam. Thank you so much once again for articulating ideas I've thought about and long forgotten because I couldn't turn them into words.
If more psychologists thought this way then the world would be a much better place
Delightful essay. I particularly liked the Betty Crocker crack-an-egg metaphor, and the “bicycle shaped object”. Both of which I will steal. And I take great comfort from your point that slip will not last, because it is slop. It just evaporates.