When we think about closely reading as a practice, we often focus on the idea of proximity: on how getting closer to a text, by reading it with sustained attention, can bring us toward a richer and more complex reading of the text itself.
It certainly works like that. Sometimes we closely read to demystify—to take something hard, or unfamiliar, or strange and render it more graspable.
Sometimes, though, that feels too easy. Too tidy. Even dishonest.
Because some things can’t be grasped. (And isn’t that what art is all about?)
I was listening to Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now,” the other day, and it reminded me how, even when we closely read, something resists our proximity — something fleeting, like a deer in a wood, escapes us just as we catch a glimpse of it.
What we often recall, when we look back, is not the truth of the thing we experienced but our experience itself: the trick of light that allowed us to capture a feeling or an idea or another person, briefly, in our own mind, or heart, or soul. What we recall, in other words, are the elusive glimpses of the things we almost grasped but instead only held for a moment.
I think Joni Mitchell’s song is about this phenomenon.
At the start of the song, Mitchell closely reads wisps in the air:
“Rows and floes of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
I’ve looked at clouds that way”
A childlike gaze makes optimistic and light fantasies in the sky, playing a Rorschach test that reveals an ease and an eagerness—perhaps even a naivety.
But the singer, using past tense, knows this is only one way of seeing the sky.
“But now they only block the sun
They rain and snow on everyone
So many things I would’ve done
But clouds got in my way”
Time has changed the singer’s perspective. The clouds that once conjured fairy tales have transformed to storms and messes, blockers on the paths she may have taken, if only she could have.
“I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
from up and down and still somehow
it’s cloud illusions I recall
I really don’t know clouds at all."
Rather than decide her more cynical gaze reveals a more true experience, however, this wise singer ruminates on what all these shifts in perspective mean in the grander scheme of a whole sky.
After looking at the clouds from different perspectives and vantages, the singer remembers most their power to be illusive—or perhaps elusive—to elide any tidy, stable interpretation.
In the end, she says she really doesn’t know clouds all.
She knows, instead, the “up and down” of her own experience, the “give and take,” and “win and loss” of her own subjective position. She has known those illusory ice cream castles of her own imagination; she has not known clouds themselves.
As the song develops, she refrains about love and life in the same way: she has seen it all from the keen, wide gaze of an innocent and the jaded perspective of the hurt (or, perhaps, the experienced). All of it tinged by the reality of her own self—of her own filters and settings, her own unique gaze that can, we learn, turn the clouds in the sky into feathery dreams or life-altering road blocks.
This is a beautiful thing about herself; it perhaps has nothing to do with clouds. Or love. Or life. She knows only what her own gaze, her own close reading of these experiences, gave her.
I think about this fact of the subjective experience a lot. How any work of closely reading also requires some reading of the self: some level of awareness that you’re looking at that story from your own vantage—maybe you’re seeing ice cream castles while someone else sees a storm.
The power of closely reading, really, seems to lie in its ability to see both sides, now. To see how your own perspective lets you know some things so deeply, and other things not at all.
Of course, there’s so much nuance to all this. There are some who try to claim closely reading can really be an objective practice of uncovering a single, solitary Truth or Meaning; others who bend texts to their own interpretations so violently, finding evidence for any story they want from virtually any combination of words. Sometimes, the same people do both of those things simultaneously, and the resulting confusion feels like someone flickering the gas-lamps and lying about it.
There is also the fact of craft. When we closely read a carefully crafted work of literary art, we are tracing not only our own cloud illusions, but mapping ourselves as closely as we can to the writer’s illusions, too. We are suspending our disbelief; we are entering a willing space of seeing castles from clouds.
Even there, in that intimacy between reader and writer, we find ourselves at odds about motivations and desires and justifications. Some of us read the end of The House of Mirth with clear-eyed certainty that Lily meant to kill herself; others read the ending as a tragic accident, tinged with her damning naivety. I’ve read the novel enough times to know I’ve read it from both sides. What the ending reveals to me, on each re-read, is something about myself as much as something about Lily Bart.
Mitchell’s song reminds me that perhaps the most reliable way to think about closely reading is as an art of mystification.
Not the rooting out or digging up of hidden ideas within stories or images, but the careful attunement to patterns and shapes—to the castles and storms of my own perception. A willingness to let it all tangle up and down, to be a mess of contradictions and half-truths and fleeting moments of insight.
After all, The House of Mirth meant something entirely different to me the first time I read it in 2008. I’ve looked at it from both sides now, up and down, and still somehow, it’s the ever-shifting nature of its meaning that I recall now.
Perhaps I really don’t know the story, at all.
Closely reading it, dozens of times, has gifted me its illusions and its glimpses at ideas so much larger than myself, or of Lily Bart. Every time I read it, it becomes clearer in some ways—and so much stranger, more mystifying, in others.
Maybe that’s the magic of a good story: despite all your readings and re-readings, you really don’t know it at all. You can only know it for a moment before it—and you—shift like clouds in the sky.
Over in the club…
We’re finishing Passing by Nella Larsen this week. It’s not too late to join us! If you’ve read the novel before, check out this guide to Part 1:
I loved this, Haley, which uncannily chimes well with my re-reading of Joan Didion's 'Blue Nights' this weekend, which I am reading in preparation for Petya's project. I am finding it a harder read than when I first encountered it years ago, and I had to sit a while and give it some thought. I realised it is around the ways in which I myself have changed and the personal life experiences I am bringing to my close read.
Beautiful! What I love about this, along with closely reading in general, is being open to the possibilities. We allow ourselves the room to grow and discover new things in a text, including lightbulb moments regarding our perceptions…whether they’ve changed or stayed the same. I’ve always loved being in communion with curious readers. Thank you.