Olivia has old problems.

I have struggled with one problem about literature for a while now. The question I ask is how do two people connect to each other? The impossible task of truly communicating troubles me. Since I took a course on Louis Aragon and Proust, I've been worrying about this. It haunts me. Proust seems to declare one cannot truly reach the other, and Aragon extends it to his theory of the inherent impossibility of the couple. I find literature heightens our focus on this problem and shoves it in our faces. I think literature is limited by the distance between the author and the reader, and this very limitation gives light, perhaps, to our beautifully impossible task to connect.

Perhaps this old poet gives me an answer, for today. Below is an excerpt from a poem titled Ars Poetica?

I have always aspired to a more spacious form

that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose

and would let us understand each other without exposing

the author or reader to sublime agonies.

In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:

a thing is brought forth which we didn't know we had in us,

so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out

and stood in the light, lashing his tail.

(...).

And yet the world is different from what it seems to be

and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.

People therefore preserve silent integrity,

thus earning the respect of their relatives and neighbors.

The purpose of poetry is to remind us

how difficult it is to remain just one person,

for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,

and invisible guests come in and out at will.

(...).

- Czeslaw Milosz, Berkeley 1968.

-- Olivia