In a recent post, Joseph Fouche explored the concept of story ecology and wrote the following:
Much of what we know we do not know that we know. Many of the stories that make up our master narratives are explicit: we know we know them. But many more of the stories that make up our master narratives are tacit: we don’t know we know them. Explicit stories are the visible tip of the iceberg while tacit stories are the unseen looming mass beneath. For every one thing we do in accordance with an explicit storyline, we do ten in accordance with a tacit storyline.
In a discussion with a fellow English professor Mark Edmundson, William Deresiewicz says that he tells his literature students every semester, “I’m not going to be teaching you anything you don’t already know, it’s just that you don’t know that you know it yet.”
Edmundson paraphrases Longinus‘ “On the Sublime”, “When you’re reading or listening to somebody and you feel as though you have created what you have only heard, you have hit an instance of the sublime.”
It seems that the greatest pieces of literature are able to uncover certain things buried in the DNA of our humanity that we didn’t know that we knew existed until that very moment. Literature’s “aha!” moments are rarely due to new discoveries, they are simply putting into words and images things that before we could only sense dimly and inexpressively as shadows.
The truths found in classics are not novel ideas, they are often ancient and universal, but continually needing to be rediscovered as they move from the tacit to the explicit then back to tacit, like sand on a sea floor being kicked up, floating around in its glory for a short period, then settling once more.
“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” – Ecclesiastes 3:11
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