Member-only story
Feeling Something, Being Someone
On Ben Lerner’s ‘Leaving the Atocha Station’
I want to be a person like somebody else was once.
— Peter Handke, Kaspar
Have you ever enjoyed a book (or film, etc.) so much, thought it encapsulated your feelings so well, that you became desperate to share it with friends? Only to encounter the worry that, since your friends are different people, they will experience it differently to you and will not take from it the exact feelings that you did.
The worry, in other words, that what you took from the book (or film) is only what you’d already put into it, and that exactly what you put into it is ambiguous and uncertain enough that, as much as you’d like to, you couldn’t possibly communicate it directly to a friend. And so can only hope to rely on the book (or film) somehow, no matter how misleading of a messenger it might be?
Is that the worry that you can’t share your feelings at all?
Is it a worry of being lonely?
This feeling often makes me want to write about fiction. Though not to ‘review’ it, per se, as if to translate the fiction into a judgment on its value; only to talk to you about it, as if to try to translate to you the way it translated my own feelings back to me.
