Emma - Jane Austen

    Well, with the long commute across town to OTIS several times a week, sitting in L.A traffic, I might as well delve back into the old audiobooks. First up was a title I'd been interested in for a while, a Jane Austen novel called Emma.
   It's one of her big, bulky, dense and juicy works, and I loved hearing every word of it. Now, full disclosure, I didn't get through the whole thing, maybe I'll finish it later on in life, but I got through what felt like maybe 3/4 of it.
    The writing of Jane Austen always refreshes me, inspires me, and boosts my confidence in my own kooky little unexpected worldview that was never encouraged in school, in the workplace, or by my society in general. She really is one of those special people that keeps me going with her invented language that functions in a way that is unexpected, un-"educated" (if you know what I mean) and doesn't rely on formula or conventions in that "one size fits all" manner executed for the better enjoyment of university students and Barnes and Noble customers.
    It is truly the best kept secret of this world, that the people who make the biggest difference in the long run, are the oddballs and the independent thinkers who saw the world being held together by a different type of glue than the kind that everybody else assumed. I will always cherish people like her, who do not seek to lessen the mystery of the universe, but rather deepen it.
   Her words have a dramatic tension between them that causes them to want to be on the same page for reasons other than your Barnes and Noble Bestseller volumes, which stroke our society's ego by reinforcing all of our little "how to" tidbits we give each other, feeling so cute when we do so. She's invented her own kind of dramatic tension that can only exist on her pages, and you can't reproduce or replace a generation later in a different packaging, squeezing more profit out of it, like you can with most of the stuff that gets written.
    Literature as art is such a hard concept for some people, when they'd rather view it as a science. Some theory is trying to be proved, and as long as you properly plug in all the components and variables into the equation the "proper" way, you get the "proper" solution. And of course, we've decided what does and does not "count" as a "proper" solution. Usually based on whatever affirms our worldview versus whatever doesn't, and I don't mean by way of the content. The execution itself affirms a worldview. Not everyone sees the English language as the same type of tool. 
    I think this way of looking at it is so popular among scholars because "it doesn't require any personal investment on my part. I want to keep it all intellectual, and not have to lean on it psychologically and feel it lean back on me, deciding how compelled I am by the push."
   But that is quite what matters most. I am able to push on Austen's writing, and feel it push back. She's not trying to confirm my worldview, stroke my ego, or her own, for that matter. Just showing me a type of glue that was always holding the universe together that I may never have noticed, or felt confident enough to take a chance on. But luckily, people like her provide an avenue for me to do this, giving me an excuse to loosen up, as we all need.
    The book itself surrounds the titular character, who is unwed, and presumably in her early 20s, so is feeling a bit of pressure from people around her to choose a partner. For the first portion of
the book though, she is not the focus. She has a dear friend, Harriet Smith, who is in her late teens, and catching the eye of a few suitors, and receiving a formal proposal from the character of Mr. Martin. Emma, seeing herself as a capable matchmaker, actually talks Harriet out of accepting Mr. Martin's proposal. This does not not go over well with Mr. John Nightly, (if I'm remembering this all correctly, hold on while I open up a new tab to fire up Google and search all these character names...bum bum bum, okay, here it is... oh no, I had it wrong...)
   Okay, so it was George Knightley who reprimanded Emma for stopping the marriage. John Knigtley's brother. I was even spelling the last name wrong (Remember, I listened to this on audiobook. Thank God for Google.)
   Anyway, it looks like those two have similar obstinate personality types, Emma and George Knightley, and come to a head on multiple occasions. This time, Knightley is insulted at the insistence that "your friend is not good enough for my friend." Then Knightley fires back by basically saying that "you overestimate your friend's desirability, and she's lucky she's getting the attention of Mr. Martin." That scene was a hoot.
   As the story progresses, more characters are introduced, and Emma does eventually become attracted to a young man named Frank Churchill, who unfortunately has eyes for another, (Jane Fairfax) but therein lies the  drama.  Emma does start to realize that she may not be so all knowing as she fancies herself, which is nice to see, and shows a different, more respectable type of wisdom that comes with admitting you were wrong about something.
    The writing is that type of magic where there is not a whole lot of content, no explosions or action sequences or highly emotional exchanges, but the story TELLING, the letting down of the trail of breadcrumbs, between this sentence and that sentence, this chapter and that chapter, this arc of action and that arc of action, adds up to something greater than what's on the page.
    

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