A Sign Like the One Described in “Gatsby” I was talking about Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” in the comment section with reader Geaaronson the other day, so it seems like a good time for another blast of emotional insight from that novel. Have a look:
An Example of Emotional Insight from Emily Dickinson
The diction here is a bit of a push for us – not because of the words used, which are all quite familiar – but just because poets used to take a lot of poetic license in pushing diction around all over the place to fit the meter and the rhythm and the rhyme and so on and so forth. … Read More
Better than WTF – Emotional Insight from Keats
We’ve all had WTF moments. Keats put how he felt about one into a very famous poem.
Stillness on the Water – Emotional Insight from Mark Twain
From Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn“: I took a good gap and a stretch, and was just going to unhitch and start when I heard a sound away over the water. I listened. Pretty soon I made it out. It was that dull kind of a regular sound that comes from oars working in rowlocks when it’s a … Read More
The First Painting I Ever “Got”/Felt/Appreciated
I was 16, in Paris. I wanted to find out what a work of art was all about. I somehow knew that there was something to it that I hadn’t ever experienced myself. I went to the Musée d’Orsay. I found the Monet Water Lilies and started looking at them, trying to find what it was that made them so … Read More
The Appreciation of Art is a Use of Emotional Ability (with an Example from F. Scott Fitzgerald)
We’ve been talking about how the appreciation of art is a use of emotional ability as well as intellectual ability. Here’s a powerful example from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” This is packed with the stuff we look for in a work of art. Turn your eyes on this, read every word with your whole heart, and see if … Read More