Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Seth Godin calls it the “essential skill of thriving in a world that's changing fast”: “Flip, the ability, when confronted with a world that doesn't match the world in your head, to say, “wait, maybe I was wrong.” Or as David Foster Wallace wrote: “To really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time... (one should be willing to deal) with massive, high-entropy amounts of info and ambiguity and conflict and flux.” That, of course, can be exhausting. Which is probably why at times, many envy what Wallace calls “the “moral clarity” of the immature”! If you don’t try to keep upto date with all that changing info, then you could end up being wrong for the reason that Paul Graham cites : “When experts are wrong, it's often because they're experts on an earlier version of the world.” Even if you’re trying to get all that info, Wallace reminds us of: “How much subcontracting and outsourcing and submitting to other Decider...

I am told that great literature is something that can be interpreted differently at different times, often by the same person. Does that mean great literature has to be ambiguous? Or does it mean that the characters are complex enough to make it possible for the reader to ponder what William Empson describes in his book, Seven Types of Ambiguity : “People, often, cannot have done both of two things, but they must have been in some way prepared to have done either; whichever they did, they will have still lingering in their minds the way they would have preserved their self-respect if they had acted differently; they are only to be understood by bearing both possibilities in mind.” Tim Parks wonders if this complexity is a good thing because it makes us think: “Ambiguity, uncertainty, multiplicity are positive in literature in so far as they act as a corrective against a dominant and potentially harmful manipulative hubris.” Keats called this “negative capability”: “When ...