Just a little Saturday thought – with a lot of metaliterary potential, if you ask me…
Here is another interesting observation: compared to literature, life is much more mottled, incoherent, variable, detailed, tedious. What follows is a bizarre suggestion: perhaps literature is indeed life, in other words, the ideal of its construction, the standard for all weights and measures, while so-called life comprises a sketch, avenues of approach, a blank, and in the most felicitous situations—a version. More than anything it looks as if literature, word of honour, is the fair copy and life a rough copy, and not even the most useful.
—The New Moscow Philosophy, Vyacheslav Pyetsukh (trans. Krystyna Anna Steiger)
And isn’t there something similar in some Blixen/Dinesen short story or other? Vague memories of a teenage read, a borrowed book. I must look it up.
Have a nice weekend.
Sounds like the opposite of the classic “We are the stories we tell.”
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Well… it sounds like “we become the stories – once well polished and revised.”
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