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The secret to a happy cultural life - for me at least - is disarmingly simple. I do not feel, and I have never felt, the need to understand something in order to enjoy it. This is almost certainly a weakness in a person who writes about video games, but can we leave that to one side? Join me. Join me in the warm depths of misunderstanding - or simply not understanding. My experiential life is a bubble bath forever topped up with lovely warm water.This approach does not get in the way as much as you might think, either. When it comes to books, I'm a massive fan of Herman Melville and Thomas Pynchon - regardless of the fact that they are both writers who create, as a byproduct of their fiction, pages and pages of dense complexity in the form of scholarly articles and presentations, many of which include diagrams. No matter. I enjoy their work on whatever level is available to me as I read it. I love to watch the sinew of a Pynchon sentence as it glides and curves and flexes through a Pynchon paragraph. I love to look up the odd word in a Melville novel - a word like "scrimshaw", which turns out to be the kind of etching a bored sailor might create using a needle and a bit of animal bone or tooth. I'm sufficiently trivial to ensure that I bring no expectations regarding the rewards for reading, so everything that comes out of it is a bonus.
Sometimes, letting things flow over you feels like just the right way to experience them, in fact. Melville once said that there is "a special halo about a horse," for example. I appreciate what he means exactly, even though I would not like to have to elbow myself up from the sofa and explain my appreciation to a third party clutching a notebook and a pen. The idea simply strikes a tuning fork against the part of my brain concerned with horses, and the part concerned with haloes.
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