Literary Amnesia I’ve been reading classic novels for more…
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Literary Amnesia
I’ve been reading classic novels for more than three decades. I studied literature and philosophy. But I’m still suffering from what a fellow student in 1998 summed up as: “I never think about a book once I close it.”
I’m a copywriter and I know very well that all the books I read somehow seep into my idiolect and unconscious. But that’s about it. I can spend an hour with a single difficult paragraph, figuring out its meaning phrase by phrase, looking up words, names, facts, annotating in the margin—but as soon as I close the book, all this is over and I suddenly think about how I’ll have to take out the trash because it’ll attract ants when left outside and breed flies when left inside.
When I take up the book again and see my annotations, most of my thoughts come back, even years or decades later. But in the meantime, they're locked away like a pharaoh’s treasure in his sarcophagus till the tomb raiders arrive.
I’ve tried writing down my thoughts in little notebooks and easily accessibly documents in apps, but it’s the same there, if not worse. Once I close the notebook or the document, every thought is lost until I reopen it. And, different from what I read in a book, I don’t even immediately recognize what I wrote as something I've ever seen before. With a book, my reaction is always: “Ah, yes, that passage!” With my own writing, it tends to be more like: “Wait a minute, *I* wrote this?”
Has anyone ever experienced a similar kind of amnesia and found a method of integrating literary works, characters, symbolism, arguments, and memorable quotes into their everyday lives on a more openly conscious basis?
#entertainment
source
I’ve been reading classic novels for more than three decades. I studied literature and philosophy. But I’m still suffering from what a fellow student in 1998 summed up as: “I never think about a book once I close it.”
I’m a copywriter and I know very well that all the books I read somehow seep into my idiolect and unconscious. But that’s about it. I can spend an hour with a single difficult paragraph, figuring out its meaning phrase by phrase, looking up words, names, facts, annotating in the margin—but as soon as I close the book, all this is over and I suddenly think about how I’ll have to take out the trash because it’ll attract ants when left outside and breed flies when left inside.
When I take up the book again and see my annotations, most of my thoughts come back, even years or decades later. But in the meantime, they're locked away like a pharaoh’s treasure in his sarcophagus till the tomb raiders arrive.
I’ve tried writing down my thoughts in little notebooks and easily accessibly documents in apps, but it’s the same there, if not worse. Once I close the notebook or the document, every thought is lost until I reopen it. And, different from what I read in a book, I don’t even immediately recognize what I wrote as something I've ever seen before. With a book, my reaction is always: “Ah, yes, that passage!” With my own writing, it tends to be more like: “Wait a minute, *I* wrote this?”
Has anyone ever experienced a similar kind of amnesia and found a method of integrating literary works, characters, symbolism, arguments, and memorable quotes into their everyday lives on a more openly conscious basis?
#entertainment
source
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