life isn’t merely a collection of moments, because if it were, there wouldn’t be experiences commonly shared amongst a good portion of mankind. being stung by a bee, breaking a bone, playing with your neighbors on the street, staying past bedtime for the very first time, breaking up, losing a friend - these, amidst other things, have been lived or will be lived by a great deal of humanity.

even mundane, routinely things. having cereal for breakfast, taking a bus, going to the little family owned bakery in your neighborhood at the end of the afternoon to buy bread and pastries to have with coffee alongside your family. there’s region-specific ones, too. eating on one of those heated kotatsu tables in japan, celebrating 4th of july in america, going to a convenience store in south korea, taking the tube in england, drinking, i don’t know, chimarrão in brazilian south/southeast. 

i suppose there’s career-specific ones as well. being an unpaid intern and making coffee, drawing blood out of a screaming child, hammering a nail. and lest we forget hobby-specific: frogging a crochet project, stinging a needle into your thumb while sewing, getting hand cramps from journaling too much.

talking with neighbors, flunking a test, drinking orange juice, getting a nobel prize. all of these things make up a life, and this is what i like most about reading.

of course technique and aesthetics and form and context and other things are important and relevant and must be taken into account when approaching literature. milton’s complex cosmos and syntax in paradise lost, wilde’s supernatural in the picture of dorian gray, flaubert’s free indirect speech in madame bovary1, the way conceicao evaristo pulls up a mirror and makes society stare deeply into itself in olhos d’agua - and many other things i can’t write or else this paragraph would become an exhaustive self-indulgent list of my tastes instead of simple examples to illustrate my point - god, how utterly wonderful they are to experience and dissect, and how remarkable they are in their own right.

however, speaking on a personal perspective, i hereby offer other examples and beg the question: is there anything better than life?

ms ice sandwich’s tutti knowing the entire choreography of a gunfight from her favorite movie which she watches with her father, dazai’s schoolgirl taking public transportation, yoshimoto’s protagonist in kitchen sleeping on the sofa, dorian gray playing the piano, mr utterson staying up at night worried about his dear friend, jonathan harker having a travel journal, lucy and mina’s walks, adam making a wreath of flowers for eve in paradise lost book 9, the fucking creature from frankenstein reading PARADISE LOST and finding SADBOY SATAN RELATABLE (“i was supposed to be thy adam, but i am rather the fallen angel) - christ almighty, is there anything more wonderful than that?

this ability literature has - the capacity of opening up your mind and giving you access to new forms of living life, of expanding your repertoire of experiences and (and i shout out hans robert jauss2 and the literature professor who forced me to read him3) breaking your horizon of expectations of life experiences and causing a myriad of ethical, psychological, moral, and social effects in the moment of its reception - that’s my favorite thing about literature.

now i am a linguistics nerd as well as a certified literature nerd4. although i am thrilled to analyze syntactic inversions, figures of speech, meter, rhythm, rhymes, narrative structure, the coining of new words, and the overall structure of a work, i am just like frankenstein’s creature: whereas i deeply appreciate and respect all of milton’s technical maturity and the literary devices used in paradise lost, it is the fatherless sadboy emo satan aspect that makes me so fond of it.