A Good Idea

Here's a very fruitful idea from Iain McGilchrist's book: ... works of art - music, poems, paintings, great buildings - can be understood only if we appreciate that they are more like people than texts, concepts or things. De-contextualising the idea doesn't help to do it justice, and McGilchrist provides lots of, dare I say, empirical evidence in its favour, but even as a standalone apercu it makes a lot of sense to me. Indeed, it's something I've always 'known', matching perfectly my own experience of encountering great literature and great music. (I'm not so responsive to painting & architecture, so I'll pass on those.)

One of the several implications of this way of looking at how we respond to art is to severely call into question the whole notion of what might be termed the critical-analytic response - otherwise known as how Literature is 'done' in schools and other so-called places of learning. I suspect the real attraction of 'doing' lit this way is that it renders the experience open to some kind of assessment or measurement (clumsy as this usually is); the genuine human encounter is largely closed to such possibilities, which is, I suppose, in part what makes it human.