CAN A BOOK MAKE YOU CRY? I posted yesterday on how Laurence Grenier had encountered people who reacted physically to certain paintings. Laurence is interested in this because she herself has had a profound emotional and physical reaction to reading Proust. She is not alone in having this kind of reaction to literature. Housman said that he tried not to think of a line of true poetry while he was shaving because the poetry would make his whiskers stiffen and make it harder to shave.
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I always think of Housman’s remark when I see a quotation of Potter Stewart’s statement that “I don’t know how to define obscenity but I know it when I see it.”
I cried when I was 10 and read Where The Red Fern Grows. I defy any child to read that and not lose it. It’s almost cheating, in a way.
We had a lecture on King Lear today, and I can absolutely see how that would move somebody to tears. Interestingly, when they found John Keats’ copy of Shakespeare, the two plays that were annotated the most were Lear and Midsummer. Lear was supposedly his favorite.
He also introduced Keats by reading us a poem that he said was by someone “our age” and then I realized his was right. Many of his best poems were written when he was 21 or 22 years old. Makes me feel like I’ve wasted quite a bit of time.
I feel differently about a movie if it moved me to tears. Even if I didn’t like the movie as a whole, if it made me cry at some point (usually at the end, but not always) I judge it a more worthy movie than I would have otherwise. I think sometimes we cry out of recognition of something deep inside of us that the painting/book/movie/music has touched upon, and the recognition is stunning.
I was warned in advance about Where the Red Fern Grows and it still tore me up inside. From what I recall, I felt despair more than anything else. I felt the author was being cruel to me. Then when I thought about it, I definitely felt manipulated. The television show “Lost” is pretty manipulative in a similar way, but it still works on me.