Last night I reread some of Christopher Hitchens' essays from the collection Arguably. I specifically reread book reviews of books about Stalinism and Hitler. Obviously the subject is not one conducive to lyricism, but Hitchens' prose moved me on a number of occasions with its clarity, cleverness, and pithiness. I found myself reading and rereading certain passages over an over, marveling at the manner in which Hitchens conveyed not only information in a conventional sense but also information in a more complete sense, which includes wit and affect and a unique voice.
I suppose the cliche is that Hitchens achieved sublimity in these passages (which I will have to reproduce later when I have access to the book), which seems a trite way to describe what I felt when reading them. Perhaps I can write what I felt without recourse to third party categorizations or tepid taxonomies.
The words cascade. That is what it feels like. A waterfall washing over my consciousness. But the waterfall does not cleanse. It adheres to me, but the waterfall still cascades, even as it adheres. My consciousness opens, basin-like, to receive the words and what they mean and I gorge myself on them and I gorge myself on the meaning and I gorge myself on the feeling, how they feel to me and how they make me feel and the basin expands or maybe becomes porous allows other thoughts in so what I know and what I read mix in the swirling pool, boiling, bubbling, exhilarating, growing, until things calm in the moment of reflective awareness that indicates the full import of the thing learned and not just the ideational content, but the full import, the affective experience, the visceral excitement, the thrill of discovery, the aesthetic pleasure...
Even the moment of reflective awareness brings satisfaction unlike any other, a satisfaction that can only be gotten in the context of receiving something new from the written word, from the well-written word that captures cleverness and gravity and humor and tragedy in an irreducible manner that isn't so much intellectual as it is felt, that exceeds the representational pretensions of language as we have been taught it is to be understood, that is simply good because of the unconquerable sense of freedom and accomplishment the self-reflective moment of awareness gives the reader, an insuperable moment that cannot be denigrated or denuded, destroyed or defaced, a moment unique in its invincible ipseity, given in the communion of the word and the mind, the willingness to embrace the new, to reconcile the new with the known, to accept that the new and the known fuse into an expanded you...
This is something like what I felt reading those sublime passages in Hitchens, which I can only describe as the joy of learning and for which I remain unrepentantly sentimental.
