My bottom line

I beg you all to forgive me for this redundancy, but I have cut a small
piece from another message that I already sent to the list, and I am
resending this small piece alone. I am doing this because I want it to be
read last, and most sharply. This, I think, really is the bottom line for
me in this conversation. It's all reducible to this. If you already read
it once in the bigger debate, I ask you to read it again here, by itself.

---
Jim said: "What exactly do you mean by 'the very substance'?  See, I think
part of our disagreement has to do with what we mean by 'interpreting' a
text.  Again, I believe you can understand Achilles' rage, but does that
mean you understand the entire Iliad?  I believe we can both understand,
say, Hamlet's distrust of Rosencranz and Guildenstern, but does that mean we
understand 'Hamlet'?
"What is this 'very substance' what you're talking about?"
It's hard to define, of course, but I know it when I see it.  It depends to
some degree on the specific text in question, too. I think in general it's
something big, something human, something beautiful, something important
enough for men (in any time or culture) to be concerned with.  With certain
books by certain authors, there can be several things, sometimes very
different and hardly related, which can all apply.  Whether a girl in a
short story has a certain surname is not the very substance.  Whether
Shakespeare was a royalist is not the very substance.
This is probably largely because I'm at a school where nearly every class
begins with an "opening question" about a book, which leads into discussion,
but when reading books I try to ask myself questions about them.  Some
questions are harder to find than others, and some seem to be plainly and
inescapably suggested by the author when we're sensitive in the right ways.
Some questions seem to get down to the very heart of a book, seem to shed
light on the book, and nearly every part of the book seems to say something
about them.  These are the ones that are most important to me, that seem to
involve the "very substance" and which are far too serious and complex and
profound to have been absent from the author.  The concerns that these
questions face are the ones that Great authors write about, and they are
unchanged after millennia.
Certainly the details are interesting and worthwhile to study and research.
If I didn't think so I wouldn't have spent thousands of hours (and counting)
studying dead languages.  But it seems to me that the most worthwhile and
important things in literature are timeless.  So long as men can breath or
eyes can see, so long will Shakespeare be read and loved; and, yes,
understood -- not entirely and with certainty, but understood as men
understand things, which is given to fumbling and mistakes and uncertainty.
No cultural or historical research is necessary for this, any more than
historical or cultural research is necessary to understand the very stuff we
define ourselves by.
It is important to say, too, that I never said that I understand the Iliad
entirely.  Nor do I understand rage entirely, but the Iliad helps me
understand rage without any historical or cultural research.  What Homer has
to say about rage, whether we with our Christian morals agree with it or
not, stands quite outside of time and culture, because it is tied to the
very stuff of humanity.  And by reading Homer, unaided by that research, we
can hear Homer -- Living Breathing Singing Homer! -- talking to us about
rage.
This, in the plainest and simplest words, is all I mean to say in this
conversation.
-robbie
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