Steeped in Plenty of the Middle Class and the Penalties of Boredom

I read in fierce encroachments of vividness Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” in 1965. By means of a process of de-familiarization Tolstoy describes the familiar with words not usually associated with them. When experience is bereft and the world lies hidden, an author can send out ideas that may produce resonance in the environment which will radiate back and condense, where all other messages are scattered in space and lost. Or according to Robert Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities”, ‘when the world overbrinned the threshold of his eyes, its meaning lapped against him from within, in soundless waves. Remain indifferent wherever one has not that ineffable sensation of spreading out one’s arms and being borne upward on a wave of creativeness! For you are an idea yourself, one in a particular state. You are touched by the breath of something, and it’s like when the quivering of strings suddenly produces a not. And then there’s something there in front of you like a mirage, and the tangle of your soul takes on shape, becoming an unending cavalcade, and all the beauties of the world seem to stand along the road,’ (Musil, 1988). After reading these lines and believing thirty-one years of rejection slips, I decided to become educable.