Maybe not even a very good notion
Apr. 14th, 2026 11:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeOkay, I have made a principled decision not to read my self-assigned book for April, Sometimes a Great Notion by local author Ken Kesey. I started the other night, got to page 43 out of 600-some, and was becoming uncomfortable for an unusual reason. Having given it some thought, here’s what I’ve concluded.
The other day, I was watching a Nova episode I’d seen before, and I was reminded that whenever we remember our memories, they become unsettled and open to influence. Also, from the book manuscript I’ve written about how concepts work in our minds, I know that how we think about any given topic can be influenced by taking in new related information.
Sometimes a Great Notion, which is considered a powerful work of fiction, was set within 10 miles or so of my birthplace, in a small town on the Oregon coast, on a river used for logging (but given a different name). There’s a house we used to drive past whenever we came inland that was widely considered to be an inspiration for the house that features so prominently in the story. Also, the book was published when I was about two years old. So, as I read those first pages of the book, whenever pretty much anything was described – the house, the roads, the forests, the café, the river – I had a mental image to draw on from my childhood. And that means that the more of the book I read, the more my mental images of my childhood community would be changed by the book. And the book has a lot of violence in it. And there are no other great works of literature – possibly no other novels at all – set in that time and place, that I could read to balance things out.
So if I want to keep my childhood memories intact… well, even though they’re by no means idealized, they’re mine. And I shouldn’t read the book.
Now, I could make a case that I should do it anyway if my memories were somehow slighting an important perspective and would benefit from the correction. In this case, though, I don’t think I would gain much from learning about the world and thoughts of a logger who took individualism to a pathological extreme…
Another idea is, if I really think I need to read the book someday, then I should watch the movie first. It came out 7 years after the book and starred Paul Newman. It was filmed about 40 miles north of my hometown, on another coastal river. Then, if I read the book, in theory my brain would call up images from the movie, rather than images from my own early memories. And that might be fine? We’ll see. Probably not this year, though.
The other day, I was watching a Nova episode I’d seen before, and I was reminded that whenever we remember our memories, they become unsettled and open to influence. Also, from the book manuscript I’ve written about how concepts work in our minds, I know that how we think about any given topic can be influenced by taking in new related information.
Sometimes a Great Notion, which is considered a powerful work of fiction, was set within 10 miles or so of my birthplace, in a small town on the Oregon coast, on a river used for logging (but given a different name). There’s a house we used to drive past whenever we came inland that was widely considered to be an inspiration for the house that features so prominently in the story. Also, the book was published when I was about two years old. So, as I read those first pages of the book, whenever pretty much anything was described – the house, the roads, the forests, the café, the river – I had a mental image to draw on from my childhood. And that means that the more of the book I read, the more my mental images of my childhood community would be changed by the book. And the book has a lot of violence in it. And there are no other great works of literature – possibly no other novels at all – set in that time and place, that I could read to balance things out.
So if I want to keep my childhood memories intact… well, even though they’re by no means idealized, they’re mine. And I shouldn’t read the book.
Now, I could make a case that I should do it anyway if my memories were somehow slighting an important perspective and would benefit from the correction. In this case, though, I don’t think I would gain much from learning about the world and thoughts of a logger who took individualism to a pathological extreme…
Another idea is, if I really think I need to read the book someday, then I should watch the movie first. It came out 7 years after the book and starred Paul Newman. It was filmed about 40 miles north of my hometown, on another coastal river. Then, if I read the book, in theory my brain would call up images from the movie, rather than images from my own early memories. And that might be fine? We’ll see. Probably not this year, though.
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