Below the surface-stream, shallow and light,
Of what we say we feel – below the stream,
As light, of what we think we feel – there flows
With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep,
The central stream of what we feel indeed.
Mathew Arnold
How do we know ourselves? What lies do we tell ourselves with ‘shallow’ words, supposedly brim full of feeling yet not so. We crowd ourselves out of deep feeling with mere froth.
Like froth on the surface of a stream or river. Colourful, even garish, transient and sometimes poisonous.
Arnold asks us to be still. To be silent and to wait.
To feel INDEED.
The Power of Blackness: Richard Wright Re-Writes Moby-Dick
In his autobiography Black Boy (1945), Richard Wright describes the desperate hunger for books which characterized his boyhood and the diverse subterfuges he devised in order to satisfy it. A century earlier, Frederick Douglass, as if anticipating Wright in The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), had revealed that a black boy, in a racist society, would have to resort to duplicitous means if he yearned to read. Reading proved liberating for both the young Douglass and the young Wright, since it provided concepts and narratives which confirmed and illuminated their experiences. As a consequence, they became insatiable readers, and as biographers and literary critics have often shown, they later relied on their reading to convey to their own readers the distinction and signification of their writing. Thus, critics demonstrate that Douglass’s Narrative depends for its success in part on the rhetoric and structure of such works as The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and Emerson’s “Self-Relianc e” [1]; and from the moment of Native Son’s publication in 1940, it was evaluated in relation to other novels–Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath in Henry Seidel Canby’s promotion of the novel for the Book-of-the-Month Club and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.