#oceanvuong

At its heart, literature feels like an offering: a human voice, fragile yet insistent, carrying across the dark. Strip away the genres and schools, the analysis and criticism, and what remains is a simple question: This is how the world feels to me — does it feel that way to you?

And yet, in this age of algorithmic summaries and artificial intelligence, something vital feels at risk. To let machines read for us is to inherit the skeleton of a story without its living pulse. Empathy does not come from the mere transfer of information but from dwelling in the grain of a sentence, the pause of a comma, the rhythm of a voice reaching out to us across time. When those textures are flattened, what is left is efficient but bloodless — a report on what it means to be human, without the experience of humanity itself.

Karl Marx described alienation as the estrangement of human beings from their own “species-being,” the essence that makes us capable of creating, feeling, and recognizing ourselves in others. To treat literature as something to be consumed through digests or mechanical paraphrase is another mode of that estrangement. It reduces the act of reading to utility, severing us from the raw encounter that binds us to one another. Against that drift, reading in its fullness becomes a form of resistance — a way of reclaiming presence, of insisting that empathy cannot be automated, that recognition requires our participation.

This exchange, humble as it may sound, has shaped civilizations. Aristotle, in his Poetics, claimed that tragedy offers catharsis — a purging of pity and fear, a ritual cleansing achieved through the safe container of representation. What seems at first like a technical detail becomes, on reflection, a timeless truth: we turn to stories not merely to be entertained but to metabolize emotion, to bear what otherwise might be unbearable. Centuries later, Martha Nussbaum, in Love’s Knowledge, argued that literature provides a form of moral philosophy — a training of the imagination that lets us inhabit perspectives beyond our own. In both accounts, the power of literature lies not in formal perfection but in a raw human gesture: the ongoing attempt to breach the silence that separates us, to transform solitude into recognition.

For me, this practice is not about mastery. I have never been especially gifted in the close reading of texts. My interpretations feel incomplete, my essays often lack elegance. But I persist — not because I expect to master the craft of literary criticism, but because I believe the act of engaging itself is essential. To read seriously is to keep the channels of empathy and imagination open. Just as muscles wither without use, so too does the ability to feel beyond oneself. Literature, as Nussbaum suggests, is an exercise — a way of building our capacity for connection in a world that continually tempts us toward indifference.

When I sit with Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, I feel language stretch itself toward consciousness: not the blunt recording of events, but the flicker and fade of perception, the half-formed thought, the swell of memory dissolving into the present. Woolf shows me that the texture of life is not linear but tidal, and in reading her, I sense my own inner life mirrored in that ebb and flow. By contrast, Toni Morrison’s Beloved offers not the rhythm of thought but the weight of history, insisting that the traumas of the past do not remain buried but walk among the living. Morrison’s novel echoes Aristotle’s vision of catharsis: the text does not spare me from fear or pity but channels those emotions into recognition, forcing me to sit with the ghost of history until I see it as inescapably human.

James Baldwin, in The Creative Process, reminds us that the discovery of literature lies in realizing our pains are not unprecedented. Reading reveals that solitude is never total; the feelings we believe to be private belong to a wider human story. I return to that observation often, because it captures both the solace and the summons of literature. Solace, because I see myself in others’ words and am less alone. Summons, because the very recognition of shared vulnerability demands that I acknowledge the lives of others, each carrying griefs and longings as real as my own. Roger Ebert, speaking of cinema, called movies “a machine that generates empathy.” Literature, I think, works no differently: it places me within the lives of others, allows me to feel what it is like to inhabit a different consciousness. Baldwin insists that our solitude is never absolute; Ebert insists that empathy is civilization’s most urgent task. Between the two, I see why reading matters: it is both the recognition that I am not alone and the invitation to recognize others in turn.

This is why I think of literature as both mirror and bridge. A mirror, because it reflects my own inner weather back at me. A bridge, because it carries me outward, across boundaries of time and culture. To read Homer is to feel the persistence of human longing across millennia, a reminder that even in the epic past, people loved, feared, and hoped as we still do. To read Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is to feel the urgency of voice in the present, tender and unflinching, a bridge into the intimacies of migration, queerness, and memory. These works do not stand apart; they converse with one another across time, and in their conversation, I am invited to join.

If there is a paradox in literature, it is this: it both isolates and connects. Reading is solitary — a quiet communion between me and a page — yet through that solitude, I am linked to another consciousness, sometimes separated from me by centuries. Literature creates a paradoxical intimacy at a distance, an intimacy all the more profound for being impossible in any literal sense. Baldwin, Morrison, Woolf, Vuong, even Homer; they are gone, or far away, yet their voices arrive in my solitude, refusing to let me believe that solitude is absolute.

And so, I continue to read, and sometimes, haltingly, to write. It is not fluency that matters, but willingness — willingness to engage in this long ritual of recognition. Literature, to me, is not an achievement but an exchange — a conversation that outlives its speakers. It insists that I listen. It refuses to let me retreat into silence or certainty. It keeps me in motion toward others, asking again and again: This is how the world feels to me — does it feel that way to you?

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References

Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by S. H. Butcher, Macmillan, 1902.

Baldwin, James. The Creative Process. In The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948–1985, St. Martin’s/Marek, 1985.

Ebert, Roger. “Roger Ebert on Empathy.” Speech at dedication of plaque outside the Chicago Theatre, July 2005. Transcript via RogerEbert.com, 2018.

Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fagles, Penguin Classics, 1996.

Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Progress Publishers, 1959.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.

Nussbaum, Martha C. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford University Press, 1990.

Vuong, Ocean. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Penguin Press, 2019.

Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Hogarth Press, 1927.

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moonlight peeking through the sullen tree,

Come back. Come back to me.

And it can be a dangerous one. Sometimes we are not seen enough, and other times we are seen too thoroughly, we can be exposed, seen through, even devoured.

Hunters examine their prey obsessively in order to kill it. The line between desire and elimination, to me, can be so small. But that is who we are.

There must be some beauty -- and if not beauty, meaning -- in that brutal power. I am still trying, and mostly failing, to find it.

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