I had a little realization moment tonight as I was reading in preparation for my writing course. My professor messaged me asking me for the source of a quote that I had posted, and I followed the original source link only to find out that the referenced document was part of an exclusive academic collection to which I was denied access. One of the student authors of Writing about Literature in the Digital Age talked about what I like to think of as an academic aristocracy, wherein only the intelligentsia, the scholars, have access to literature. He said that despite the clear abundance of literature and analysis of said literature, a minuscule proportion of it is actually accessible to the general public; the rest remains dormant, locked away in the cold of subscription-only academic databases and in the dark of dusty drawers in old, gray filing cabinets. The best thing about writing is the humanity in it, and if we take that away, then there's no purpose in it. Literature is not great because is has lots of words or lots of good phrases but because it resounds within the human soul and causes us to realize ourselves a little bit better than we previously have. Literature is not a dispassionate, selfish requirement to put words on paper but is rather like "opening a vein," to quote Hemingway, putting a piece of yourself out there for others to poke and prod and understand and love or hate. You have to make yourself a little bit vulnerable for it to really work. And the world, it's not just a filing cabinet, apathetic towards its contents and unconcerned but is rather a living, breathing organism that grows and changes and is fed by print and passion. The call of the writer is to express, however clumsily, the yearning and the turning of the human soul, to capture in words an emotion, a thought, a realization. We have to take what we see and what we feel and what we know and share it. Because in the end, the beauty of a song in not in just knowing it but in singing it for others to hear.
One of the student authors from Writing about Literature in the Digital Age discussed how not only writing, but literary criticism itself should allow for personal expression and not just a formal, stiff view of literary works. WIthout the human element, literature becomes a corpse and rots the mind rather than exalting it to new ideas and higher forms of expression. I totally agree that writing should "open a vein" and that we have to let our blood flow into our writing or it will never come to life. Blood as a symbol represents life and without it we die. Our life blood must flow into the white pages of what we write and turn it blood-red. I understand it can be hard. Being vulnerable scares me. But, it makes our work jump from the page into real life.
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