It is always tempting, of course, to impose one's view rather than to undergo the submission required by art -- a submission akin to that of generosity or love -- that evokes the private response rather than the authorized one. But art is not technology and cannot be "mastered". It is an endless access to revelatory states of mind, a vast extension of living experience and a way of communing with the dead. An intimacy with truth, through which, however much instruction is provided and absorbed, each of us must pass alone.
There is art, the primary. (I think of books at the moment). Poems and stories, fables and narratives. And then there is the whole set of books responding to the primary. How much of one's reading is primary, how much is secondary or tertiary. It is not all the same. Just something to be mindful about.
Personally, I feel in the primary too, there is an element of tested by time. Those are the golden books. The current is interesting, but the ones tested by time, with that distance of time and space have more chances of garnering that submission to art that she talks about than the ones where the mind questions and counterpoints to everything since it is too close in time and space. This I feel in my reading. Her words allow the fuzziness about the kind of books one reads to help clear a little. I have always wondered about a good measure of reading. Number of books doesn't really help understand the reading year. Because there are as many that provide dipping pleasures. So perhaps this about the golden primary, and the rest. There is a succour and solace in art once the self is submitted or forgotten. Modern books will provide that for a later age perhaps. For us, the time-honoured. As to the rest, one reads but one now knows when one needs the fount, where to look for it, hopefully. That passing alone - for the intimacy with truth.
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