light gazing, ışığa bakmak

Saturday, November 13, 2010

real

"We understand, of course, that art does not copy experience but merely borrows it for its own peculiar purposes. Americans however do not find it always simple to maintain the distinction. For us the wonder of life is bound up with the literal fact, and our greatest ingenuity is devoted to the real; and this gives reality itself magical and even sacred properties and makes American realism very different from the European sort. With us the interest of the reader and often of the writer, too, is always escaping toward the fact.

The non-factual imagination also returns to the fact. Ask a woman to describe her son, and she is likely to tell you with pride that he is 6 feet 2 or 3 inches and weighs 220 pounds, that his shoes are size 14 and that he eats four eggs at breakfast and two pounds of steak at a sitting. Her love in short, frequently takes a statistical form. Years ago, in Chicago, I used to listen to a Negro virtuoso, Facts-and-Figures Taylor, who entertained shouting crowds in Washington Park by reciting the statistics he had memorized in the Public Library. “You want to know what the steel industry exported in nineteen and twenty-one? You listen to this now.”

Saul Bellow, daqui.

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