Sean Patrick Cooper

I really enjoyed the Samuel Delany interview, for a variety of reasons. Top one being this right here:

This was the major thing I took away from the interview—the major thing I found a great amount of truth in: that the greatest gift from literature isn’t some message you can bottle into a line or two and treat as a transferable commodity, a message you can quote and insert into a paper or notebook or at the bottom of an email signature, but rather an actual living experience. An experience defined by that moment when you take possession of another person’s view of the world and re-examine your own world view from this new perspective. It’s these transformative experiences that are the bedrock of every great encounter I’ve had with literature. When I get to experience what it means to be a living human being from an entirely different set of senses and perceptions—from the unique senses and perceptions owned and operated and ideally honestly distilled into the text by the author—this is when I truely experience literature. Try to capture that experience in a quote or message or witty “take away” you can toss into your Facebook status message. Try to distill the experience of great literature into 140 characters and you will then understand, perhaps, what it’s like when a parent is asked to articulate in a sentence or two why, exactly, she loves her children.