I\u2019ve read things literally my whole life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hold up. Let me rephrase that. Actually, let me point out how that is a perfect opening statement for this piece I’m trying to write about life as a literalist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Everything is wrong with this sentence, if I pick it apart. Not literally everything, though the case could be made for literally everything to be wrong with it. There is certainly enough fuel there to make myself appear incapable of making a defensible statement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One can hear it as \u201cFor my whole life, I have read things literally.\u201d Which makes sense, and was the intended sense when I wrote it down. Reading things literally is my default. (No. I don’t mean that reading things, literally, is my default. I mean that I default to reading things literally. Things, by me, are read literally, by default.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In another reading, \u201cI have read things\u2014for literally my whole life.\u201d This reading puts the emphasis on the reading rather than the quality of reading\u2014I literally read things, rather than reading things literally. It’s a fine statement\u2014not the one I was going for, but not wrong either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But for the reader who reads things literally\u2014not who reads things, literally, but reads literal meaning into things\u2014both of these readings are problematic. Seriously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the first, there is a conflict. “For my whole life” has a literal meaning, that, though literal, is also ambiguous. Does life begin at conception? Does it begin at a certain level of brain development, or when the hormones start determining the shape of one’s body parts? Is it at the moment of the first cry, as it is in some cultures, or the moment one was conceived in their mother’s mind? There’s a lot of ambiguity there, so to make a statement that includes “for my whole life,” there is a high bar to demonstrate reliability as a narrator.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let’s move on from there. For my whole life, I have read things literally. What is the author saying here? Is reading things confined to the written word? Or does it include reading a person’s body language, reading the tone of a room, reading the weather for clues about what to wear. One could make a strong case that yes, from the moment of birth, or even slightly before or after that, I have been reading things in a way that doesn’t put too much spin on what I’m seeing\u2014I’m reading literally. Finally, something that kind of holds up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But hold up: what if we consider things like agency, understanding, intention? Did I have these when I was a baby? And if I didn’t, can my definition of reading contain that? Is simply witnessing a room the same as reading a room? The case can be made either way. The science is not settled on that one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But if our reading is reading reading as the act of parsing text, that’s a harder case to make, and my statements show their holes (figuratively). In either reading of the opening sentence, there is a calculation error, and the difference between the two is really a matter of scale, or emphasis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the first, the statement suggests that I have been reading things in a particular way\u2014which is to say “literally”\u2014for the natural span of my life. This exposes the ambiguity in the term “reading,” of whether witnessing is enough, or whether a certain level of character development is necessary. If “witnessing things as they are, from moment to moment” can be a definition of “reading things literally,” one might say that that was my default state from birth, and that it actually diminished as my witnessing mind was colored by the conditions of my environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One might say that it became impossible to read things literally, because my lens became shaped by conditions, and at some point I was reading in a way that no one else would be able to be inside of, because those conditions shape every response. So yeah, problematic statement. Don’t trust this guy too quickly. They’re probably trying to put one over on you, or pull something out from under you. Or otherwise hoodwink, harass, or antagonize your delicate sensibilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If we’re confining our sense of “reading” to “parsing words for meaning,” then the glaring error stands out right away. Even though I am hyperlexic, I didn’t start parsing text until I was 3 1\/2. Given my age, “my whole life” represents an error of 5.79%. Depending on the context, that could be a rounding error, or it could mean certain death. Sometimes the stakes are not obvious. It’s good to be up front with your discrepancies, so that you can stand behind your statements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And the second reading amplifies the discrepancy, by putting “literally” as a modifier to the length of a life. How can something exist literally when there is a 5.79% gap in it? That could be seen as functionally abstract\u2014a woefully partial life being presented as whole. Who would do that? Only someone who has it out for us, or who has it in for us, or who is giving us the in and out, but not the ins and outs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And there’s another problem with that opening sentence that only just came to me (figuratively\u2014the idea arose in my mind, which can be described as a coming of sorts, for the not-so-literal minded). The term literal\u2014what work is that doing here? Is the author talking about literal as in a collectively agreed upon sense of precision with language? Or are we reading this (Can we read? Or can only one person read, times how ever many people are reading? Is reading collective? How can I get some space to be alone?) as literal in the sense of “pertaining to literature,” which is a vast and many-splendored thing with a shit ton of nuance and shading and the opposite of what we (if there is a we) think of as literal in a sense that we can all agree on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The more I try to make this sentence make sense, the less I’m able to justify it, and the more the reader gets confused along with the writer. Much like online conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
William S. Burroughs was right: language is a virus from outer space.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"