J. Epstein 의 에세이 "Educated by Novels"에서

에세이를 읽는 것은 친구네 잘 가꾼 정원에서 가든 파티를 즐기는 거라는

생각이 든다. 에세이를 쓰는 건 그 반대라고 하기엔 잘 안 맞는 것 같고

다만 뭘 써볼 생각할 틈을 안 주고 읽는 즐거움에만 빠져 지내는 데 대해

스스로에게 변명해보는 거다.

 

Joseph Epstein 의 "Educated by Novels" (1989)를 그의 에세이집 "A

Literary Education and Other Essays" (2014)에서 읽었다. 몇몇 구절을

다시 읽어본다.

 

"Edward Shils ... constantly rereads Balzac and Dickens, as one

might think every good sociologist ought to do. The anthropologist

Clifford Geertz makes it his business to keep up with contemporary

fiction.

 

"I prefer the more modest assessment set out by Robert Louis

Stevenson in an essay entittled 'Books Which Have Influenced Me':

 

   The most influential books, and the truest in their influence,

   are works of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma

   which he must afterward discover to be inexact; they do not

   teach him a lesson which he must afterward unlearn.

 

"[N]o one ever formulated the essence of [Henry] James's criticism

and fiction better than T. S. Eliot, who, in a single jaunty sentence,

wrote: 'He had a mind so fine no idea could violate it.'

  

"To create a concept, said Ortega Gasset, is to leave reality

behind -- not all of it, to be sure, but often the most interesting

part. The world today is perhaps more concept-ridden than it

has been at any other time, owing to the spread of rather

mediocre higher education and the pervasiveness of the mass

media. In contemporary politics, in social science, even in science,

there appears to be no life beneath that of the theory, the concept.

The study of literature was once an antidote to life lived at the

level of theory and concept. Today, in universities, literary study

is itself concept-plagued.

 

"To be educated by novels, then, is to be educated into a strong

taste for the sheer variousness of life -- Tolstoy himself said that

artist's purpose is 'to compel us to love life in all its countless

and inexhaustible manifestations' -- and at same time into a

counterbalancing distaste for not only the easy but all

generalization."

 

 

Paul Cornoyer, Winter in New York