V On imagining the future: the positive counterpart to devastating literature
On dreams, being devastated by literature, and imagining the future
This is the final essay in a five-part series called “On dreams, being devastated by literature, and imagining the future.”
It is not necessary to read the earlier essays in advance of this one, but if you would like to, you will find them as follows:
III: On Pather Panchali and Dr. Zhivago (contains major spoilers for these two stories — recommend skipping ahead to part IV if you intend to read or watch either of these)
IV: On A Time for Everything and The Buried Giant (contains minor spoilers for these novels)
V (below): On imagining the future
It also works to read just I, II and V, skipping the discussions of specific devastating stories altogether.
V: On Imagining the Future
What is the opposite of devastating literature?
It was partly that question that drew me into writing this series.
I was interested in the intensity of truly devastating stories, and wanted to explore that, but not only that.
Thinking about devastating literature seemed a fantastic starting point for discussing the opposite: literature that gives the same intense feel, but this time with a sense of potentiality and power and human decency, and a clear impression that the future is something we can shape and make better for ourselves and for everyone.
That’s such a big thing, and such a big experience, as big as the experience of being destroyed by fiction.
I wanted to explore and share that, but it seemed to me that I needed to get there step-by-step, because the literature that does that for me might not do it for you at all.
If I wanted to share my personal experience of it, with examples and explanation, I needed to put it first into a frame that everyone could use to think about their own kinds of texts that do that, and why.
That is, I want to give you a way to argue, not so much with my examples, as with my concepts, and see if they match yours. (But also, I want to share the examples, because they make me happy.)
I started with dreams as storytelling because I thought that that could be a shared entry point into the kind of intensity I meant, the kind where the stories can have as powerful an effect, or close to it, as actual lived experience.
I then tried to explore what it is for literature to be devastating in the sense that I was imagining, and to distinguish it from literature that merely evokes intense grief, often of a kind where one feels manipulated emotionally, which is how I myself felt when reading, say, Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, or Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl.”
In parts II, III and IV I developed the idea of devastating literature a bit further, both in the abstract and in the context of examples of four particular stories: two novels from the beginning/middle of the last century that had also been turned into breathtakingly beautiful films, and two more recent works of literary fiction.
I ended up concluding that for me, devastating literature has several specific characteristics. First, it tends to evoke an intense reaction that is likely based on an effective combination of the intellectual, the emotional, and the aesthetic.
That is, literature doesn’t tend to devastate unless it engages both one’s mind and emotions, and does so with the help of beauty in the storytelling.
Second, it tends to involve not only a personal tragedy but also a societal one: to show us a way that our world could be that we would never want it be, for ourselves or for anyone else. I argued that the societal element is what makes a story feel like something one is implicated in, not something one is merely a witness to, looking at the painful events from a comfortable distance and perhaps even feeling a bit proud of ourselves for our compassion for the characters involved.
Stefan Zweig, the Austrian novelist, once wrote or said something about the war — I’ve forgotten the context now, and the precise quote, but it was something along the lines of looking out his window at a stream of refugees walking by and thinking “those poor devils,” without ever dreaming that he would be one of them just a few months later.
Sometimes, when I’m taking a train and stopped at a station, I find myself looking idly at the people on the platform, wondering what their stories are. The suddenly the doors will open and those very same people will step into my carriage and sit down nearby, and I’ll have a moment of slight shock: they’ve gone from being stories I’ve been witnessing through glass to actual people sharing my physical space.
Devastating literature, it seems to me, is literature where one does not feel oneself to be looking at the story through a window, and where a combined impact on mind, emotion and aesthetics is so powerful that one feels it almost in one’s body, with a sense of “this is not how the world should be.”
So what is the opposite of that?
When I looked back over my own experience, I realised that I was thinking about texts that fulfil two criteria: first, they create a reaction so real that one feels it almost in one’s body, as with devastating literature; and second, that instead of leaving one with a devastating new awareness of how bad the world can be, they leave one with a positive sense that one could imagine how the world should be —that is, that one is capable of imagining and shaping a better future.
But before getting to a few examples, I’d like to clear the brush by considering what kind of literature is not the opposite of devastating literature, or not as a category, for me in any case.
First, I would argue that literature that primarily provides the solace of beauty is not the opposite of devastating literature.
I start with this category because sometimes a sheer aesthetic experience is so intense that one feels it almost in one’s body, just as with devastating literature.
In my own case, beauty of language tends to have that impact more than other kinds, but of course it can also come from visual art, or from music. For me, it happens most often in poetry, but reasonably often in prose as well. Either way, it has something to do with the words falling just right, something about capturing the rhythms and balance of the language.
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay1
Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.2
But that experience of rightness in language is not, in itself at least, the opposite of devastating literature. Intensity of aesthetics is powerful, and one can feel elevated in a way that is is equal to the grief one feels from devastating literature. But in my sense of devastating, a personal experience of beauty, even of sublimity, is not a full counterpart. There needs to be some element connected to imagining the world as one wants to be, even if indirectly.
Second, I don’t see comfort reads as the opposite of devastating literature.
Last summer I was stuck home dealing with the effects of chemotherapy, and wanted absolutely not to be devastated by anything I read.
I wanted no intensity at all, and no sadness, and no pain in the stories.
Instead, I wanted the amazing gift of feel-good novels: novels in which all of the main characters are basically well-intentioned, and in which the inevitable mistakes and character flaws that go along with being human, and the vagaries of fate, never, ever lead to catastrophic outcomes. I read dozens of them.
Sometimes I even turned to the Pettson and Findus books. These are Swedish children’s picture books about an old man in a village and his talking, highly demanding little cat. The books are filled with comfortingly detailed and whimsical illustrations of their house and garden or occasional outings to the hills or a lake. I had a pile in the writing studio in the garden where I spent most of most days mostly napping; just looking at the covers could sometimes be relaxing.
All of these books were incredibly important, almost life-saving. I don’t know what I would have done without them.
But they are not the opposite of devastating as I mean it here, even though they helped me from being devastated by a somewhat tough circumstance.
Comfort reads can leave one — or maybe I should say, can leave me — feeling better, maybe even quietly happy, but they rarely leave me feeling a counterpart to the intensity of devastating literature or of poetry, nor with a heightened ability to imagine and shape the future. I should add here that I think that many people who write feel-good novels, especially romances, have well thought-through, and often wise, opinions about, for instance, what a good relationship is, and intentionally use the fiction to model and explore them. There is something powerful about that: these kinds of fictions can have real impacts on readers, and can change the world in that way. But that’s not quite the same thing, as I experience it, as the kind of literature that I’m trying to pin down as the opposite of devastating.
Finally, I’d argue that utopian fiction isn’t the opposite of devastating literature, or not per se as a category, at least. I worried, when I started this essay, that everyone would assume that we were going to end up talking about utopian novels, and I wondered if I should put a disclaimer up front. Because utopian fiction is interesting, but not, in general, I don’t think, as interesting as where I hope to end up.
Perhaps I should admit first, though, that although I went through a phase when I was between 11 and 14 or so of reading every piece of utopian fiction that I could get my hands on, I remember almost nothing about any of them. (Some of them ended up being dystopian, but I didn’t realise that when I started reading.) I know that I started with Aldous Huxley’s Island, and that I read Erewhon, and Utopia after that, so out of order chronologically, and Walden II, and Ecotopia, and Herland, and a novel by Doris Lessing, Shikasta, that someone gave me and perhaps is utopian?
I don’t remember anything about any of these, except a bit of Island, and I could barely give you the basic plot of any these novels now, nor much of the societal values they were trying to explore. So I base my rejection of the category as much on the fact that none of these left a deep impression as on their contents themselves.
The only two utopian novels that stuck from that age, and that I still think about occasionally and have reread over the years, are Islandia, by Austin Tappan Wright (1942, but written much earlier), and Looking Backwards: 2000-1887, by Edward Bellamy (1888), the latter of which is discussed in a previous essay.
I find both of them interesting, but they aren’t the intense counterpart to devastating literature, for me. I’m not quite sure why the Bellamy one isn’t: it may be a combination of the prose not being especially beautiful (though not at all ugly), and of the problems it addresses largely being problems that had already seemed fixed in society by the time I encountered it.
But Bellamy’s book inspired “Bellamy societies” around the United States dedicated to bringing about the world that he imagined in the novel. Presumably readers of the time had an intensity of experience on reading it that mirrors the kind of intensity I have in mind. Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle — though the opposite of utopian — famously galvanized an entire new regulatory scheme for the meat industry, because people read it and demanded a better present and future.
I suppose what I am trying to argue is that explicitly utopian fiction can be the opposite of devastating fiction, as I am defining it, and sometimes it is a matter of the time and place. Bellamy’s book might have had that effect on me in 1888, and perhaps a new utopian novel now would do too. So I don’t mean to rule works out because they are utopian, just as I wouldn’t rule them out because they are stunning poetry or because they are comforting, but simply to propose that utopian fiction per se, like the other categories, is not the literature that necessarily provides the opposite side of the coin to devastating literature.
So what is?
Perhaps there is something about the age of late childhood — 11, 12, 13 — that heightens the impact of things encountered around then.
But I remember one of the first times a text gave me the same intensity of experience as the film and novel Pather Panchali, but in the opposite direction. It must have been around the same year, when I was 11, though I don’t know which of the two came first.
And this one wasn’t in fact a story, or even exactly literature.
I was in eighth grade in our little elementary school, which only went up that far. I was younger than usual for the class, and had skipped seventh grade, and so was looking forward to what everyone (accurately) said was the highlight of the combined seventh-and-eighth grade classroom: a segment on the US Constitution,
I had never read it before, of course. I remember sitting in the classroom and doing so.
The opening — the Preamble — was this:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
This piece of prose rocked me.
I think, trying to explain to myself now why it had such an impact, that it’s because I was intensely aware that people had written it: that human beings had used language to think through and actually create the world that they wanted to live in, the world of democracy and freedom that I myself lived in.
Language that in itself did something was entirely new to me.
But I think that this passage had the impact it did — I felt it almost in my body — is in part because the language is rather beautiful.
The rest of the Constitution, as we read on, was more prosaic, and of course this preamble was followed by passages that made it clear that the people who wrote those beautiful words also accepted slavery.
So it’s not that I was starry-eyed or hero-worshipping. It was more that I realised that people could change the world, and that I could read their intentions in language and see them trying to implement them all at the same time.
Decades later, I happened to be walking past the Law library at Harvard University. The building — Langdell Hall — is big and solid and classical, the kind of aesthetic one can associate with permanence in a good way. (That is, to me, the building doesn’t feel imposing in the sense of trying to projecting power over people, with an idea to intimidate. It more feels like it takes the nature of books and law and continuity seriously, and wants to use a certain kind of architecture to convey that.)
On the facade of the building, over the doorway, very legible, is a bit of engraved Latin:
“Non sub homine sed sub Deo et lege.”
I had a bit of that same intensity of feeling, engaging mind and emotion and aesthetics all at once, when I read that inscription.
I had no idea of what text the quote was drawn from, and it didn’t matter. The words on their own, which I read as “not under man, but under God and the law” were beautiful and captured something that mattered (taking the “God,” part, in the secular context, as a stand-in for morality or decency).
It was moving to see them there, literally carved in stone.
At the time, the engraving felt like a powerful public reaffirmation of an unquestioned principle of the legal system. Now it is a reminder that the rule of law cannot be taken for granted. The beauty of the phrase, perhaps precisely because it is pulled away from any context and physically highlighted in this way, gives it an impact that I experience as literary, which is why I’m including it here.
There are so many other texts I’d love to discuss. Let me mention just a few, then conclude with a bit of analysis and a final quote.
One of the texts is among the most famous passages in English literature, written by John Donne. If you’ve read it a million times before, please try to remember how it felt the first time you encountered it.
The language is beautiful, of course.
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind…3
May I admit that I am still utterly moved by this, every time I read it? It has to do with the sense of universality, I think: the creation of a way of seeing the world that says: every person matters, expressed in a way that sinks into one’s bones.
I feel the same way about the King James Bible translation of Corinthians 13 (that’s the one with “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity” that is often read at weddings) because the language in that translation is stunningly beautiful, and because the “charity” bit, which I take in my secular reading to refer to a sense of loving-kindness towards all people, again gives a view of a way of seeing the world as one might want it to be.
One more example, perhaps. When I was a teenager, the non-fiction of George Orwell (that is, not the novels like 1984 and Animal Farm, but the essays and letters, especially the essays) were extremely important to me. Some of them even affected me with the same kind of intensity as devastating literature, but muted, in the same way that the intensity from the Knausgård and Ishiguro novels discussed in part IV was muted in comparison with that from the two stories discussed in part III: a difference of degree, but not of kind.
Orwell’s language isn’t transportingly beautiful, but it’s almost never off: there is something about the sentences that tends to fall right.
And his way, imperfectly to be sure, and perhaps not lived up to in reality, of trying to sort out his own sense of decency on the page was powerful. I tended to leave off reading a piece with the idea that this is possible: to be someone in the world attempting to see it with clear eyes and to use to language to imagine how one wants it to be, in ways that are sometimes the same as it is now, and sometimes different.
If we had more space here (metaphorically speaking — I am trying not to take up too much of your time with all of this) I might also share some sentences from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” written literally from jail in the wake of a non-violent civil rights protest.
I should mention, incidentally, that I am not including rousing texts in this discussion — speeches from the civil rights movement, for instance — not because they’re not relevant, but because there isn’t space in the essay to explore the differences between beautiful language in speeches that moves people towards kindness and decency, and language that somehow effectively rouses people to exclusion, hatred and cruelty.
There is a world of academic study examining that — how it is that people get roused to hatred and cruelty by language — but I haven’t read it, and I don’t want to try to explore it here. I’ll just say that in my view, language that rouses people to kindness probably usually engages the mind as well as emotion, and very often might meet my definition of the opposite of devastation, while language that rouses people to hatred probably relies on emotion primarily, and in any case in the absence of decency most certainly does not meet the definition.
The definition, in the end, for me, I think, comes back in some ways to that notion of the window between oneself and the story. In the texts that I’ve experienced as the opposite of devastating, I’ve had the sense that the writer was not looking at the world from behind glass, and that the reader is therefore made aware of the possibility of not doing so either, but rather of seeing the world as a shared space one can shape for the well-being of all.
The closing set of quotes is actually from one of the few non feel-good books that I managed to read bits of last summer. It was a then just-out collection of essays by Rebecca Solnit, which I had bought because I had enjoyed her book on George Orwell (discussed in passing in an earlier essay here).
I couldn’t read much of the book at a time, and in fact still haven’t read all of it, but often when I did read I found myself underlining passages that gave me, in a muted but real way, a sense of the opposite of devastating literature.
Here are some of them:
From “Tortoise at the Mayfly Party,” in No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain, Granta Books, 2025:
Events, like living beings, have genealogies and evolution, and to know those means knowing who they are, how they got there, and who and what they’re connected to. If you follow them in either real time or the historical record, you can often see power that emerges from below and ideas that move from the margins to the center. You can see how it all works. Yet, those trajectories and genealogies are often left out of the news, the conversation, and, apparently, the conception of how something came to pass.
Change itself becomes invisible when your timeframe is shorter than that change, and the short-term view breeds defeatism and despair. (p.33)
I have been a witness to and sometimes a participant in change, and again and again I’ve seen people fail to recognise change, believe change is impossible, walk away prematurely, dismiss those who are trying, because of that lack of perspective. (p. 36)
From “Despair is a Luxury”, in the same volume:
What motives us to act is sense of possibility within uncertainty—a sense that the outcome is not yet fully determined and our actions may matter in shaping it. That is all hope is, and we are all teeming with it all the time in small ways. We plant a seed expecting that it might grow and that we might be around to see it grow and admire the flower or eat the fruit. We buy five pounds of flour in the expectation that we’ll probably live long enough to do that much baking, buy a ticket for a trip weeks or months away. We may be run over by a bus on our way out for coffee in the morning, but we hope we’ll be around to drink that whole cup and then get on with our day. (p. 72)
If we can recognise that we don’t know what will happen, that the future does not yet exist but is being made in the present, then we can be moved to participate in making that future. We can be skillful enough to make directed efforts and sophisticated enough to know that results remain unpredictable. Many acts have had a huge positive impact, but not immediately or directly, so learning to look for and value slow and indirect consequences is crucial to recognizing the nature of change. (p.73)
If you missed the earlier essays in the series and would like to start at the beginning, you will find the first one here:
I On dreams
This is the beginning of a five-part series of essays called ”On Dreams, Being Devastated by Literature, and Imagining the Future.”
Christina Rossetti, “Remember,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45000/remember-56d224509b7ae
Ezra Pound, Canto 1 of the Pisan Cantos, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54314/canto-i
John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624). Info at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devotions_upon_Emergent_Occasions, full text at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Devotions/Meditation_17