private language

of all the many many many things that have happened to me and other people in the past week or so that i might write about, in fact i find myself inclined to begin where i left off, with the end of Herzog. (btw, on the corner of the fountain in rittenhouse square. only celebrities and people from manhattan are that well-groomed.)

there's a certain amount of physical description in the book, both of people and of landscape, rural and urban. what concerns me is the natural landscape, what happens when a very good writer spends time describing the grass, the light, the trees, and a reader is reading closely. i presume that i am not singular in the degree to which i can and do identify with what i'm reading; i'm not the only person who looks up from a book to discover it's much later than one though, not the only person to cry over fiction. perhaps i have a particular sensitivity, but that's all. regardless, i don't think i'm making this up:

whether an aspect of bellow's talent, or an aspect of my current mental climate, or both, reading those descriptions, and committing to them, as i put it to N, affected a strong and sudden shift in perspective for me: identify deeply with the way grass is, with the way light is, and what is it your mind is up to? what is this imaginative intimacy, and what constitutes it? written, somehow relevant to the affective environment of the narrative of a man's transformation, what does one make of dovetailing the glimmering, insentient natural within the human adventure?

omniscience is an easy mode to describe, to conceptualize; perhaps what i'm edging toward is that it's another thing to inhabit, even in the confines of a novel, all-seeing. i saw it a bit more clearly today reading Iris Murdoch's Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals: [regarding Wittgenstein's Tractatus] "Science and 'ordinary life' are public and use public, that is significant, language (or in other words, language), whereas morality and religion are private and ineffable."

who on earth knows whether and how to agree or disagree with such a thing, but i think the point is that the end of Herzog, and perhaps, at its most generous, literature as a category, has an ability to somehow trade in private language. of morality and religion? i leave that be. to have a private experience, and to speak about it, is difficult, and yet these days i lose my patience with public language of any tone faster and faster, i think, because it is public, because i feel (narrowly: feel) that public discourse is lousy at doing anything other point to or away from other public discourse. i don't mean to be cynical about it. we all need statements we can understand quickly, without looking too closely. but looking closely -- what then?