On the Necessity of Literature.

Abstract

empty, and at once cold and gross. People need something more emotionally rewarding and more personally and socially concrete. Even Hemingway, that ostentatious connoisseur of the separate peace, came to realize, with another poet's help, that no man is an island. Neighbors, friends, relatives, countrymen, colleagues, heroes, and lovers help us to live not only by the material benefits they confer but by the feelings of warmth and comfort they inspire. In order to be fully ourselves, we need be part of humanity, not in the sense of being superior to others in some hierarchy of status, but in the sense of being intimately related to others in the most common and vital interests, such as the sharing of food and warmth in a family home however we may choose to define the terms "family" and "home." These intimate, largely emotional relations also depend on our use of language, and they can be corrupted, cut off, or crippled by misuse or awkward use of language. We have not done well, in my opinion, for the past few generations, in studying or in teaching the kind of language that builds and strengthens these relations the language, generally, of sympathetic understanding between human beings in a life-enhancing, life-promoting society. The results of our failure are too plain to see in the various gaps and barriers we rightly complain of these days: the generation gap, the color bar, the cold war, the sex war, and the credibility gaps that yawn around us on every side and threaten not only our comfort and happiness but our survival as a species on this small, fragile planet. For language to bridge these gaps, it is not enough that it be clear and precise. There must be a kind of radiant magnetism projected in and by what we say and write, and in the way we listen and read. There must be elo-