Continuing to make my way through Helprin's In Sunlight and In Shadow and found myself nodding along to this part. The main speaker is the protagonist, Harry Copeland, and his interlocutor is an older man complaining about not being able to learn as quickly. As someone who reads far more than I have time to process, I resonate with this deeply:
"Think of it. Throughout your life you've read thousands of books, newspapers, journals, monographs, letters, documents, magazines--millions of pages, scores of millions of sentences, hundreds of millions of phrases, and perhaps a billion words. Of this, what do you remember? How much can you quote? Most likely not a thousandth of one percent, perhaps much less, which, of course, is what it's written down.
"And yet your reading, your education, what you have seen and learned, have shaped you. Although the exact form falls away almost immediately, the essence remains. In what you have read, the difference between the great and the pedestrian is something very subtle that rides above the static form. The clarifying spirit can't be memorized, and the essence is in what's elusive, which is why those who can't grasp it other than willfully tend to deny it, because they can't see it."
"Go on."
"To know what you have read isn't necessarily to understand or to benefit from it immediately, as its central qualities exist above its mere form. If you and a cow listen to Mozart, you both know exactly the same sounds, the same notes, but you and presumably not the cow would hear a lot else, beyond the sounds, meaning, and meter. You would hear something the cow would not, and that the cow, if he could, would strenuously deny--I imagine."
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