Why literature works

Any idea we express is just one of many we have within us. In daily life, of course, we choose to identify with, and endorse, and live by, and fight for certain of those ideas and dampen others that, nevertheless, we’re capable of imagining: vestigial traces of philosophies we embraced when young but have since rejected (hello, Ayn Rand), the strange voices in which we used to speak, ideas that we disagree with politically and that make us uncomfortable when we find traces of them within us.

If you’re a pro-immigration person, are there anti-immigrant feelings down there inside you? Of course: that’s why you get so emotional when arguing for immigrants’ rights. You’re arguing against that latent part of yourself. When you get mad at a political opponent, it’s because he’s reminding you of a part of yourself with which you’re uncomfortable. You could, if forced, do a decent imitation of an anti-immigrant person. (Similarly, that angry anti-immigration advocate is railing against his inner leftist.)

Mostly we walk around identifying with one set of opinions and assessing the world from that position. Our inner orchestra has been instructed that certain instruments are to dominate, others to play softly or not at all. Writing, we get a chance to change the mix. Quieter instruments are allowed to come to the fore; our usual blaring beliefs are asked to sit quietly, horns in their laps. This is good; it reminds us that those other, quieter instruments were there all the time. And that, by extrapolation, every person in the world has his or her inner orchestra, and the instruments present in their orchestras are, roughly speaking, the same as the ones in ours.

And this is why literature works.

                                                                              George Saunders, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain