"Roughly speaking, the scientist tries to name things and the artist tries to avoid naming things. ... The novelist...doesn't want to clarify and distill the meaning of [a concept such as] love so that there is only a single meaning, like the Dirac equation, because no such distillation exists. And any attempt at such a distillation would undermine the authenticity of readers' reactions, destroying the delicate, participatory creative experience of a good reader reading a good book. In a sense, a novel is not complete until it has been read. And each reader completes the novel in a different way."
- Alan Lightman, "Words," A Sense of the Mysterious.
No comments:
Post a Comment