Welcome to Litsy!

I just started this book... I can stay concentrated... it's a little hard 🤦‍♀️ but I'm interested in that topic... keep reading...

#spanishreading #cslewis #anexperimentincriticism #womenthatread #mulheresqueleem

My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through the eyes of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented...in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself...I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see.

Admittedly, we can never quite get out of our own skins. Whatever we do, something of our own and of our age‘s making will remain in our experience of all literature. Equally, I can never see anything exactly from the point of view even of those whom I know and love best. But I can make at least some progress towards it. ...Literature helps me to do it with live people, and live people help me to do it with literature.

I struggled with this one. Maybe partly because my English-major literary-critical muscles are underexercised of late. But also because the first third of the book rubbed me the wrong way. It struck me as a little snobbish as Lewis went out of his way to distinguish between the unliterary and the literary, the “many” and the “few,” and how good books can be identified by whether they elicit a “good” or “bad” reading. ⤵️

”The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)”

Read along with The Literary Life podcast. Good stuff!