This Is Not a Title

Antithetical statements have contradictory concepts paralleled in one sentence, making a strong statement by emphasizing on the contradiction.

An example would be: “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” or “man proposes, God disposes”.

 Shield uses antithesis in statements such as “great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings” (p.136)

 And: “it’s natural to enter into dialogues and disputes with others, because it’s natural to enter into disputes with oneself” (p.136)

 And: “Were only certain about what we don’t understand” (p.138)

 These types of statements fit perfectly into Shields style, mainly consisting of very powerful and profound phrases that are powerful in the same way a Haiku is.

 Statements like this: “When we are not sure we are alive” (p.141) , and Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day” (p.143), they would make perfect bumper stickers or tattoos or something.
 So good for an era in which attention spans have been getting shorter.

 The nature of reality is paradoxical. The nature of, say, a pair of shoes is not the physical composition of the pair of shoes but our appreciation of them, an idea, something intangible and corrupted by our biased minds, something unreal. Therefore, the nature of reality is not real.

  Also, the nature of a real shoe is the same as that of an unreal shoe. If I put you behind a screen where, perchance, a mouse looks just like a shoe, reality doesn’t count, as far as appreciation is concerned, and that is all that matters: the nature of the mouse is that which we allot to a shoe.

Art? Truth?

Going for Honest, Not Real, Honest

My three favorites from G, H and I

 195

 “You adulterate the truth as you write. There isn’t any pretense that you try to arrive at the literal truth. And the only consolation when you confess this flaw is that you are seeking to arrive at poetic truth, which can be reached only through fabrication, imagination, stylization. What I’m striving for is authenticity; none of it is real” (p66).

 Reality is immensely complex. Condensing the real world into phrases made up of words with specific definitions is implausible. The best an author can do is choose an angle of reality and observe, contaminating it with the writers own inevitably opinionated apprehensions, a processed product under the influence of his or her previous experiences. This in turn creates another type of truth, something that is at least true for the author, and that may also be potentially true for the reader, maybe in a different sense, but that is also valuable. All an author’s work has to be is honest.

 255, 256, (p.86)

 “Facts now seem important”

 “Facts have gravitas”

 Because we believe that if we get our information from what is true, from what is real, it will be of more use to us in life. That may be true when it comes to science and the like, (ex: how to tell wind speed), but not necessarily so for the more philosophical inquiries.

 241

 “The body gets used to a drug and needs a stronger dose in order to experience the thrill. An illusion of reality – the idea that something really happened – is providing us with that thrill right now. We’ve riveted by the (seeming) rawness of something that appears direct from the source, or at least less worked over than a polished mass-media production” (p82).

 Shields is right. We really are reality-hungry. Hollywood has exploited the boundaries of the impossible. Before it was the shark, then the two headed shark, then they gave the bicephalous shark wings. Now, the audience wants to find the four leaved clover, the spectacular exception in ordinary life.

Diluted Opium

From the French memoiré (memory), a memoir is supposedly a construct of the author’s memories and therefore a work of non-fiction. The thing is, our brains are not computers. We forget, transform, dilute, minimize, exaggerate and mutate memories. Therefore, what the author tells in a memoir might not be exactly what happened. Also, authors may choose to give different contexts for happenings, resulting in different results for the reader. Shield agrees with this, saying that “you’re obligated to use accurate details, but selection is as important a process as imagination.” (pg 30)

 Furthermore, an author sometimes chooses to lie in a memoir, believing it will produce a desired effect in the reader.

 One of the examples of inexact memoirs that shield gives is that of Thomas De Quinceys Confessions of an English Opium Eater, in which the author speaks of his addiction to Laudanum, an especially potent herbal alcoholic mixture containing all the opium alkaloids. Beginning the first part of his book by stating "I here present you, courteous reader, with the record of a remarkable period in my life....", and by making other similar statements, De Quincey leads the reader to think that he is no longer addicted to Opium, or at least that the most extreme phase of the addiction, that which he recounts in The Pains of Opium, has been overcome. The truth, as revealed by shields, is that “he was taking opium when he wrote the book and continued to take it for the next thirty years”.

 There are other things that I believe De Quincey might have altered in his book. His situation of extreme poverty to the point of deadly starvation in the company of a prostitute seems unrealistic since the only thing that De Quincey had to do to escape his situation was to make peace with his guardians and the people in his old life. Although it is true that he had suffered some abuse from their part, starving to death because he would not take a handout seems dramatized.

 De Quincy probably altered the truth of his story in an attempt to make his book more instructive. To teach readers about the power and dangers of opium, but also to give addicts hope of recovery. Also, De Quincey probably wanted to enjoy merit from having overcome his addiction.

 Shield would probably say that what De Quincey did in his book is perfectly appropriate, because what matters for him are not experiences, but what they made you see. It doesn’t matter who you are, but what you want to say. Shield clearly expresses this view by saying that he thinks “it’s a misunderstanding to read a memoir as though the reader owes the reader the same record of literal accuracy that is owed in newspaper reporting. … What the memoirist owes the reader is the ability to persuade him or her that the narrator is trying, as honestly as possible, to get to the bottom of the experience at hand.”