To Entertain
I, myself, do not read poetry for anything but pleasure. I read only the poems I like. This means, of course, that I have to read a lot of poems I don’t like before I find the ones I do, but, when I do find the ones I do, then all I can say is, ‘Here they are’, and read them to myself for pleasure.…All that matters about poetry is the enjoyment of it, however tragic it may be. All that matters is the eternal movement behind it, the vast undercurrent of human grief, folly, pretension, exaltation, or ignorance—Dylan Thomas
Pulitzer-prize winning novelist Michael Chabon published a collection of his essays titled Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands. In the opening essay, “Trickster in a Suit of Lights,” he writes, “…I read for entertainment, and I write to entertain. Period. Oh, I could decoct a brew of other more impressive motivations and explanations.” After illustrating with a few impressive decoctions, he continues, “But in the end—here’s my point—it would still all boil down to entertainment, and its suave henchman, pleasure. Because when the axe bites the ice, you feel an answering throb of delight all the way from your hands to your shoulders, and the blade tolls like a bell for miles.”
Chabon proposes “expanding our definition of entertainment to encompass everything pleasurable that arises from the encounter of an attentive mind with a page of literature.” He then lists some wonderful examples of literature that entertained him because his “interior ear” had been engaged “by the rhythms and pitch of a fine prose style.”
His essay is eloquently written, and discusses such things as some people’s unease with pleasure (which I have mused about in The Power of Beauty and A Change of Worldview). One of Chabon’s passages struck me in particular:
The original sense of the word “entertainment” is a lovely one of mutual support through intertwining, like a pair of trees grown together, interwoven, each sustaining and bearing up the other. It suggests a kind of midair transfer of strength, contact across a void, like the tangling of cable and steel between two lonely bridgeheads. I can’t think of a better approximation of the relation between reader and writer.
My feelings about listener and composer are much the same. As I wrote in A Change of Worldview, rather than feeling isolated from the audiences I choose to write for, I feel we share a common goal: a desire to have exciting, entertaining, and rewarding experiences.