There are two kinds of great writing.
One is the type where as you work your way through its palatial paragraphs, you find yourself thinking and feeling over and over, “Wow, this is great writing.”
Interestingly, the simultaneous sentiment seems always to be “Wow, I read really great writing,” which comes accompanied with the sensual pleasure that the beautiful enjoy in mirrors. The pleasure in having arrayed before you the evidence of your greatness. That alone justifies a mirror, and it justifies reading the kind of writing that proves to you that you read “great writing.”
Then there is the writing that moves you, teaches you, changes you. It is writing which points to your soul and to the world you live in, not to itself, and not with labels reading “great writing here.” The writing that does not have to be proven great, because people will read it and recommend it whether it is “Certified: Officially Great” or not.
I don’t think highly of snobbery, and I don’t mean to be a reverse snob here, snobbishly looking down on snobs and proudly displaying my *true* superior taste by putting down the books that only the snobby naive think to be great.
And actually, I kind of recognize the fun that people have being snobbish, and don’t necessarily begrudge them their fun. There is a place for the kind of writing that dances before you with colored ribbons and then leaves you the same person after, no more educated or purified.
But it’s still worth understanding the difference between the two. And while both are valuable, one is the kind that makes a bigger difference in the world. For now, when change is needed and survival is fragile, we need powerful writing. Perhaps someday, when our power extends to every atom of the earth and sky, and nothing can uproot us in our strength, we will find that flowers and flowery writing are all we have use for, and we’ll admire those most remarkable souls of times past, who cultivated beauty in a tumultuous world.
But for now, my vote goes for the educational, the insightful, the moving, the powerful. And if we someday live in a world where we can afford to luxuriously look back on them and call them trite and unrefined, this will be their victory.
Litany of Gendlin
“What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away.
“And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.”
There are a few problems with the litanies, but in this case, it’s just embarrassing. We have a straightforward equivocation fallacy here, no frills, no subtle twists. Just unclear thinking.
People are already enduring the truth(1), therefore, they can stand what is true(2)?
In the first usage, true(1) refers to reality, to the universe. We already live in a universe where some unhappy fact is true. Great.
But in the second usage, true(2) refers to a KNOWLEDGE of reality, a knowledge of the unhappy fact.
So, if we taboo “true” and replace it with what it means, then the statement becomes:
“People are already enduring reality as it is, so they must be able to stand knowing about that reality.”
Which is nothing but conjecture.
Are there facts we should be ignorant of? The litany sounds very sure that there are not. If I accept the litany, then I too am very sure. How can I be so sure, what evidence have I seen?
It is true that I can think of times that it is better to face the truth, hard though that might be. But that only proves that some knowledge is better than some ignorance, not that all facts are better to know than not.
I can think of a few candidates for truths it might be worse for someone to know.
- If someone is on their deathbed, I don’t think I’d argue with them about heaven (maybe hell). There are all kinds of sad truths that would seem pointless to tell someone right before they died. Who hates them, who has lied to them, how long they will be remembered, why tell any of it?
- If someone is trying to overcome an addiction, I don’t feel compelled to scrutinize their crystal healing beliefs.
- I don’t think I’d be doing anyone any favors if I told D-Day soldiers what their survival odds were.
- If I could talk to people in the Nazi concentration camps, I don’t think I’d spend my time “helping” them question the evidence of God.
- I’m not sure that examining the constructed nature of certain moral ideas and rights would be a good idea for at least some people.
The Litany of Gendlin is conjecture supported by fallacy, with no evidence for it, and a great many plausible disproofs.