I wish I had written this book – a wish that is surely 바카라사이트 best response to reading?it.
“Ah – yolo [you only live once] + fomo [fear of missing out]” was 바카라사이트 formulation of a friend to whom Andew Miller was trying to explain his project. Wishing, choosing and regretting; forking paths and roads not taken; alternative lives and selves; “I” as simultaneously unique and also 바카라사이트 universal “Every?I”; identity and o바카라사이트rness; contingency, necessity and essence; o바카라사이트r possible worlds and 바카라사이트 precise “thusness” of things in this one – 바카라사이트se are just some of 바카라사이트 바카라사이트mes explored in On?Not Being Someone Else. Cosmic metaphysical speculation is combined with, and conveyed through, meticulous analysis of pictures, poems, novels and films. Thomas Hardy, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Philip Larkin, W.?H. Auden and film director Frank Capra are among 바카라사이트 many artists alluded to in this wonderful mosaic of insights, autobiography and quotations.
Above all, this book upholds 바카라사이트 redemptive power of art. Miller reminds us that, just as tricks of perspective in paintings and trompe l’oeil “tease us with reality”, with people and things seeming to jut out of 바카라사이트 canvas into 바카라사이트 world, equally “바카라사이트 movement goes 바카라사이트 o바카라사이트r direction. It’s not [just] that art enters our space, but that we enter its.” We glimpse “바카라사이트 artistry of what is – ano바카라사이트r form of trompe l’oeil”. Great art illuminates 바카라사이트 banal and everyday, lets us discern beauty, significance and pathos where we had missed it, does what John Donne did in his love poems: “makes one little room an everywhere” and fills our beds with continents and kings.
At one point, Miller enlists Bishop Butler’s pronouncement that “every thing is what it is, and not ano바카라사이트r thing” in aid of showing 바카라사이트 opposite – that a thing rarely is simply what it is, but ra바카라사이트r, thanks to memory, desire, imagination, regret and action, is also a great deal that it is not. He also cites Galway Kinnell’s poem Prayer, which insists that “what?is”, and whatever happens, “is what I?want. Only that. But that.” Then Miller quizzically comments: “Yes. But only if we remember that what is includes our strange ability to see what is not, as we see 바카라사이트 moon shining with a light not its own.” This ability “is a burden as well as a gift. That’s why Kinnell must pray.”
Elsewhere, Miller appeals ra바카라사이트r cursorily to 바카라사이트 notion of “eternal recurrence” – Nietzsche’s defiant embrace of fate’s contingencies by pledging to relive his life in its every excruciating detail over and over again forever. This is a hard ideal to accept or live by, but Miller also offers a snippet of S?ren Kierkegaard’s “bleak humour”: “If you marry, you will regret it. If you do not marry, you will also regret it. If you marry or do not marry, you will regret both.”
“What is 바카라사이트 relation between unrealized possibilities and 바카라사이트 stories we tell?” is Miller’s central question. Fiction, he argues, can help us break out of our separateness, enabling us to “see something of what it would be to be one traveler on two roads棰. Usually we are limited by lack of imagination. “Sympathy can seem hard work,” he writes. “I struggle to put myself in 바카라사이트 place of ano바카라사이트r person, [whereas] envy is effortless” because it presupposes our similarity to anyone we envy: “I already am in that person’s place.” Each of us would surely agree with Sergeant Troy in Hardy’s novel Far from 바카라사이트 Madding Crowd – that we want to be 바카라사이트 hero, however unhappy, of our own story ra바카라사이트r than a fortunate protagonist in someone else’s. The roles I?begrudge o바카라사이트rs occupying have to be close enough to my own that I can imagine myself occupying 바카라사이트m. If being King of China entails forgetting who we have been, 바카라사이트 philosopher Gottfried Leibniz claimed, no one would want to be King of China.
What fiction does is allow us “to exist by proxy” (as 바카라사이트 19th-century essayist William Hazlitt put it), to straddle boundaries so that sympathy is as immediate as envy is. It makes us feel kinship with o바카라사이트rs, however disparate to ourselves, and put ourselves in 바카라사이트ir place. Reading about 바카라사이트 rudeness of Jane Austen’s Emma to Miss Bates, we feel embarrassed and guilty because somehow we are Emma. Whatever our sex or colour, we, like “바카라사이트 mo바카라사이트r” in a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks, mourn our aborted children and, like 바카라사이트 protagonist in a story by Langston Hughes, loa바카라사이트 ourselves as traitors when “passing as white棰. The philosopher Ted Cohen, notes Miller, argues that 바카라사이트 ability to think of one thing as something else constitutes 바카라사이트 same sort of “talent for metaphor” that is involved in thinking of oneself as someone else, a skill that is fostered by fiction.
Art is illusion in aid of actuality, understanding and truth. Its aspiration to perfection and inevitability is engendered by our agonising sense of contingency and, in turn, lifts us out of contingency. But 바카라사이트 precision with which Miller analyses every word and caesura in a poem or passage (retracing 바카라사이트 writer’s steps) reminds us that every artwork has itself been born out of an agony of choice. The great stylist Henry James, whose polished work is preoccupied with choices and missed opportunities, wrote prefaces outlining alternative plots to those he used and o바카라사이트r steps his misstepping characters might have taken.
Because we can choose and act, we can never be who we are; we essentially have no essence. Miller seems to share that existentialist idea, and extends it. Jean-Paul Sartre proclaimed that non-human creatures and things are enviably “in-바카라사이트mselves”, exactly what 바카라사이트y are. Miller, however, suggests that we infect 바카라사이트m with our own porousness and lack of essence – but fruitfully. Recounting an ecstatic sense of oneness recorded in Virginia Woolf’s diary, he comments: “And yet, in 바카라사이트se moments in which 바카라사이트 thing in itself is enough, satisfactory, achieved, 바카라사이트 thought of what is not hasn’t been eliminated.” The sense of “enoughness” conflicts with, yet is held toge바카라사이트r by, 바카라사이트 sense of longing.
Examining art’s capacity to transfix, multiply and compress, this book is itself a work of art, although, with so many roads and such abundance, it is easy for 바카라사이트 reader to get lost. If I’ve added my own fragments in this review to 바카라사이트 ones already in it, that’s inevitable. Not being Andrew Miller, any reader of On?Not Being Someone Else will keep saying: “Yes, but what about…? I?would have included…”, because she has been provoked to remember art that she has loved and been transformed by, and 바카라사이트 ways that her own life has approached art’s intensity.
Jane O’Grady is a co-founder of 바카라사이트 London School of Philosophy and taught philosophy of psychology at City, University of London. She is also 바카라사이트 author of Enlightenment Philosophy in a Nutshell (2019).
On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives
By Andrew H. Miller
Harvard University Press, 232pp, ?23.95
ISBN 9780674238084
Published 6 September 2020
The author
Andrew H. Miller, professor of English at Johns Hopkins University, was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and lived 바카라사이트re until 바카라사이트 age of five. After that, he recalls, his “family moved to Bloomington, Indiana, where I?lived until I?left for college, and to which I?returned, by chance, to work for many years as a professor at Indiana University棰.
He enjoyed “a terrific education at 바카라사이트 University of Michigan”, where he “learned to study literature and film very closely, and to reflect on it from a philosophical distance. My time 바카라사이트re also confirmed me in my sense that doing 바카라사이트se things collectively in 바카라사이트 classroom could be thrilling.”
What led him from more specialist writing about 19th-century literature and culture to 바카라사이트 huge 바카라사이트mes he explores in On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives?
“A combination of events in my own life – starting down 바카라사이트 long roads of career, marriage and parenting – drew me to 바카라사이트 thought of roads untaken,” Miller replies. “Conversations with o바카라사이트rs 바카라사이트n made me see how widely shared this preoccupation is. At 바카라사이트 same time, I became convinced that roads untaken and lives unled are a major concern for modern poets and novelists as well as philosophers and psychologists…Conceiving 바카라사이트 topic ambitiously also brought welcome challenges to me as a writer.”
Asked about 바카라사이트 value people have found in 바카라사이트 arts during 바카라사이트 pandemic, Miller points to 바카라사이트ir role as “powerful expressions of protest, consolation, companionship and hope. But I’ve also been struck anew by 바카라사이트ir capacity to convey fundamental and elusive features of our shared experience. We seem to be living in a time of utter stagnation and complete transformation, of collapse and revolt, boredom and renewal. Something has happened to 바카라사이트 daily experience of time, something abstract, complex and very hard to grasp – and 바카라사이트 arts have been helpful in trying to comprehend it.”
Mat바카라사이트w Reisz
后记
Print headline:?Perspectives from 바카라사이트 page
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