(Yeah okay Stella I'm a hypocrite!)

I never liked TS Eliot. Have you ever read the Cat thing? You could read it for hours on end and still be clueless about what he's talking about. Of course, you get the gist of it AFTER A WHILE...but if he has a point to make, why doesn't he just say so? :/

It's occured to me that literature is a man-made beauty. It's the art of expressing a thought in a very roundabout, beat-around-the-bush way. In other words, it's the art of fluff. Alexander Pope didn't like the frivolity of the society around him, so he wrote "The Rape of the Lock" to mock how people took trivial things a little too seriously and failed to treat the more important matters with the same vigilance. He couldn't just say, "Hey, guys, quit being so girlishly frivolous and focus on the right stuff" and publish that one line in the newspaper (or maybe they didn't have newspapers at the time. I'm too lazy to go check it up). George Orwell foresaw terrible social and psychological backlashes of totalitarianism, and wrote 1984 to issue a dire warning against such a society. He couldn't just say, "Totalitarianism sucks because (insert various reasons here), so don't be totalitarians, everybody" and publish it in the newspaper--and I know for a fact that by Orwell's time newspapers had already been invented. Both Pope and Orwell, amongst thousands of other famous writers, chose to express themselves in the most complicated way possible, and while their satirical attacks were blatantly salient, the attacks themselves were not quite as blatant as some people might have liked them to be (like me!). No, it takes things like Sparknotes and many months of close reading before you finally understand exactly what each author wants to say, and even then your intepretations of the stories are highly debatable.

I don't mind, certainly. Literature is a way of life. Some people see literature not only as a hobby, but as a civilized, cultured way of expressing oneself and communicating intangible thoughts in tangible words. Literature is a game. One person creates a piece of work, and the other players try to understand its meaning, reading the words that are said but not written. There aren't really any winners or losers, but it's an interesting game that few people can play well. At the end of the day, playing the lit-game means having to deal with complex thought processes that are intangible, invisible and often extremely personal; grasping them and accepting them doesn't always come easily. Literature may be the art of fluff, but it's a game of intellect and skill. You either play it well, or you don't.

But the whole thing has just gotten me thinking. If our ancient ancestors knew how to express themselves in clear, simple ways (e.g. "That's an awful hairdo" instead of "Your hair is like a nest, a web of tangled strands of brown and black"--that's probably something a poet would say), why did they choose to form the art of expressing themselves in not-so-clear, not-so-simple ways? Why come up with the art of literature when short, concise sentences would do? And, by extension, why come up with visual arts? If an artist wanted to portray world peace, for example, all he has to do is draw a. a dove b. a globe c. WORLD PEACE in block letters and be done with it. Artists nowadays go to great lengths to paint abstract shapes in the weirdest of colours, and then, after audiences put their head on one side and go, huh? they finally step up and say, "This piece of work portrays world peace". Why bother?

I really don't know. Logically, it makes no sense. People are just making things more complicated for themselves. Because literature is often ambiguous, the original meaning often gets confused with personal audience interpretations, and it may not be understood the way the author intended. On the other hand, though, maybe ancient people were just bored. Maybe they just wanted a more interesting way of dealing with the world, and with people around them.

No one will really truly understand the birth of this weird thing called "art" (or maybe you do--TELL ME!), but whatever the reason, I'm just glad literature came about. For one, I'm good at it, so that's my only saving grace--and for another, literature is powerful. A simple piece of work can change the way people think, can cause a turn in the tide. In this day and age, when political, economic and social environments are so deathly volatile, literature is an even more formidable weapon than before. The game isn't over yet; the war on words has only just begun.