Letter of Recommendation: Digging a Trench
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
But me, I'd have just found the shutoff valve for the sprinkler system.
And actually, something like that happened to me. We'd bought this very old house. With an electrical box that had evolved since ~1900. It met code, but was a rat's nest. So we hired an electrician to bring order.
Long story short, we found a circuit that led to an old iron pipe, which had supplied a long-gone outbuilding. The circuit hadn't shorted out, but the pipe was so rusted out that the circuit drew ~5A whenever it rained.
Edit: spelling
For me the question is simply does this piece make you feel something or not? A piece like this invites the reader to make their own connection to what the narrator is experiencing, and if a reader doesn't make that connection then that is okay, and it certainly does not mean that the reader is in any way less "advanced."
Maybe it goes in cycles? If society is prepccupied with formulaic narratives that stick to a tight setvof themes, then material written without a specific aim in terms of “a point” might help broaden discourse or generate discussion.
But if society is already floundering around with aimless discussion in a lot of areas, with big conflicts in terms of the basic moral or ethical premises of the world, then writing succinct, direct stories that have a point may be more useful.
Maybe more useful, but I think purely utilitarian writing does less to broaden a reader's mind than more ambiguous writing that they have to struggle with. I know it did for me. But I understand what you are saying, and I too outgrew reading "challenging" novels because I feel like my mind has been broadened enough and also I feel like I just have less time (although maybe I am just getting older).
I haven't read this essay in a while, but as I remember it Jonathen Franzen's essay "Perchance to dream" takes on this exact subject and is an excellent read. Regrettably it is not available online.
It's much easier to create the second type than the first, and superficially it's really hard to tell them apart. Like a complicated looking puzzle that turns out to have no solution, your mind may manage to make some random connections, but ultimately it's not teaching you any kind of better way of thinking. You can waste a lot of time trying to extract the true deeper meaning when there's none there.
This is a close match to the spirit of my comment, well put.
It’s very easy to write drivel that essentially means anything the reader wants it to mean, and then try to weasel out of it by claiming there is no point, and that pointlessness is part of the artistic merit.
Another thing that irks me is that quite often there really is an intentional thought process by the artist as they create something. Why make Bob say such and such to Alice at that moment? Why choose a certain style of paint that introduces a texture? You literally can go ask the artist to explain the exact intentionality beyond various choices.
Except in cases where the artist uses some sort of free association / subconscious technique, usually resulting in abstract or surreal art, there’s no intellectually honest way for an artist to claim there’s no “true” meaning, because at bare minimum there is the brain state of the artist at the time they used willful intention to create it one way and not all other possible ways.
Maybe it's doing through meaning becomes being?
The first koan resonated more with me :) However I see beauty in that “be” is there twice in the second one. If we prune the second, we get: Doing through meaning becomes.
That’s not full capture of the thing.
I think this might be closer: “Meaning through doing becomes.”
It’s a little stilted and unnatural, but to me it indicates a loop, which is a life mechanism or pattern which CBT has pointed me towards.