“Art, of course, lives in history,” said Elizabeth Hardwick. By which she meant that a novel emerges in its own time, and changes in its passage to our own. This — the likeness which is also an unlikeness, the unfamiliar familiarity — is the shock of reading classic literature, of literature even a generation or two removed from one’s own. We understand that a novel is essentially a historical survivor, written in one moment, picked off the shelf in another, yet we want it also to enlighten us about our own lives, of which the author necessarily knew nothing. Astoundingly, they quite often do. And yet it is in those gaps, those absences, that the real excitement lives. We should not recognize ourselves, and yet we do. We should not be moved, but we are. And then we are offended, or struck, or in some other way expelled, and the gap expands, and the past and the work and the author come to seem the distant shore they really are. We can visit, but not to stay.
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence