Dear Reader,
Midnight tonight is the revised deadline for this year's Write a DearReader Contest. I've been enjoying reading entries and I can still read yours, but you must email it today. You'll find all the contest info, including last year's winning entries at: http://www.dearreader.com/contest2022/index.html
Today’s guest author is Patrick House. His book Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness is a concise, elegant, and thought-provoking exploration of the mystery of consciousness and the functioning of the brain.
Patrick is a neuroscientist and writer. His scientific research focuses on the neuroscience of free will and how mind-control parasites alter their host's behavior. He writes about science, technology and culture for The New Yorker.com and "Slate." Patrick has a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Stanford University.
Say “Hello” to our guest author. Email: [email protected]
The Ideal(-ist) Reader
In 1951, Vladimir Nabokov, in response to The New Yorker's rejection of his short story, The Vane Sisters, wrote that the magazine "ha[d] not understood" the story; in part, because he had hidden an acrostic in the final paragraph which, in combination with a clue from the beginning of the story, resolved a plot riddle:
...the last paragraph which, if read straight, should convey that vague and sunny rebuke, but which for a more attentive reader contains the additional delight of a solved acrostic; I C-ould I-solate, C-onsciously, L-ittle. E-verything S-eemed B-lurred, Y-ellow- C-louded, Y-ielding N-othing T-angible...
Why did Nabokov feel the acrostic would be so obvious to the reader? Why did the editor not see it? Perhaps, of note, Nabokov was grapheme-color synesthetic, meaning that certain letters of any written text appear reliably colored. (Much of his family shared the condition, though the colors varied: the letter M, for example, appeared pink to Vladimir, blue to his wife, Vera, and "purple, or perhaps mauve" to Dmitri, their son.) This raises the tantalizing possibility that Nabokov's disagreement with The New Yorker was not centered on artistic differences in style or prose but on unknown differences in perception itself. What was perhaps an obvious puzzle to him--because, say, certain letters popped out as variegated or colored--might not have been at all obvious to his editor.
This isn't, per se, new; critics and observers have been in phenomenological border disputes for as long as pens have been furiously inked. Over a century ago, in a letter to The Egoist, Dorothy Richardson wrote in objection to the magazine's use of the phrase "stream of consciousness" to describe her novel that consciousness in fact "sits stiller than a tree". Isaac Asimov, who was accused by a critic of being "talky", once said he has no idea what his daughter looks like when she's not in front of him and that he is not highly visual: "I never see anything that I write, I only hear it. Conversations, all that I'm aware of. That's why my books are so ‘talky'". Perhaps--it seems likely, in fact--Asimov had aphantasia, or the near-total absence of inner, visual imagery. Would his books be less "talky" if he was not aphantasic? Would he still be Isaac Asimov? Perhaps the historical sweep of his Foundation series required a lack of visual distractions in both its creation and description?
Idealism is the philosophical position that all things occur exclusively because of the mind's grasp of it; that our respective inner worlds are all that there is. But how is an author or critic to account for such philosophy if it implies that, because of the perceptual differences across people, there are also great differences in imagination and effect of the same words across each of one's readers? Why do some children put books down after a few pages while others carry the same paperback around as if it's a sacred talisman? Is it possible that people attach to or prefer prose stylings of those who see the world more similarly to themselves and whose works evoke in their mind's eye or ear a closer version to the original authorial intention?
-- Patrick House
Email Patrick at: [email protected]
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
[email protected]
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