"Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the while we long to move the stars to pity." -Flaubert

"Our best writers have frequently written that language is hopelessly inadequate to their expressive task. Flaubert, quoted at the top of this chapter, typifies this sentiment. He despairs, convinced that he always falls short of his highest aspirations. No one understands what he intends. He is fated to 'beat out tunes for bears to dance to' when what he really wants is to 'move the stars to pity,' a sentiment that seems to be shared by virtually all writers. Jackals pissed on his works, said Flaubert. The bourgeois climbed his literary pyramids, he complained, without knowing and, worse, without caring whether or not they understood what his works were really about. Presumably they climbed up for the view.

"But what kind of view could such hapless readers hope for if they could not see what they were supposed to see and even the author himself was unhappy with the final product? The answer may be that rather than get us to our destination, intelligent reading only tells us where to look and roughly what to expect. It hints at possibilities, at novel states of being that we might, with luck and hard work, attain, if only for a moment. This outcome is never guaranteed, and we accept this. Reading seldom achieves what either author or reader originally intended, with any precision. Instead it elicits an intuition of possible knowledge and provides a motive force to move the imagination in a certain direction. A good reader can hope to discover not so much the exact content of a work as the possibility of a new domain of understanding. In this, there is no longer any boundary between author and audience. They become one and the same in their desire to realize raw, unexpressed possibility or, more accurately, in their deliberate pursuit of enhanced awareness of something. The same motive force that drives writers to write in the first place drives their future acolytes to read what they have written."

Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare