Matthew Goulish's Essay 'An Unexpected Revelation'

An Unexpected Revelation

“Write something every day. Good writers write often and you don’t want to be a bad writer.”
That line, written when I was in 5th grade, was just one bullet point out of a letter that I wrote for an English class to my future self. It was one of those assignments that wasn’t graded, but the teacher still forced all of the us to do it anyways because it would “be something to look back on and remember” when we were old and jaded and alone. Apparently, even when I was young, I realized how important it was for me to document what I was thinking. (To be fair, the sentence could have been completely fabricated just to please the teacher. But I like to pretend that’s not the case.) Now, even without thinking about the circumstance

A passing moment (like the one involving Verushka) is fickle on the surface, but under the right circumstances, is potentially timeless. Matthew Goulish uncovers this transition in his essay “Criticism.” He explains, “we understand something by approaching it,” and that “we approach it using our ears, our noses, our intellects, our imaginations. We approach it with silence. We approach it with Childhood” (328). In order to truly see something, or rather, to truly know something, Goulish asserts that we have to look at it in the same wide-eyed manner we would in our youth. Though we, as humans, have a tendency to analyze based on preconceived ideas, only through an acknowledgment of the unknown and an acceptance of the absurd can we truly “[liberate the] critical mind to follow whatever might cross its path” (329). In doing so, Goulish recognized the distinction between the literal and the surreal, and similarly understood the effects of embracing one over the other when viewing a subject. Verushka’s state of being was documented with a brief, exhaustively exploitative photo session, and acts as a direct representation of the concept of actually “viewing.” Everything, from her free-flowing hair to her effortless poses, personifies Goulish’s acknowledgement of the the pursuit of liberation. Though she’s the focal point of the image, this “liberation” isn’t her own; it’s the

In George Steiner’s “The Uncommon Reader” he explains, “Reading, here, is no haphazard, unpremeditated motion. It is a courteous, almost a courtly encounter, between a private person and one of those ‘high guests” (189). It’s the deliberate devourment of the ideas of such a “high guest,” or in this case, an author with variant experiences from our own, which serve to highlight our own self-realization. Steiner’s conception of an encounter, however, can be defined as anything which serves to compel an observer and bring forth his own ideas into new form, and can also be described through an indication of where a concept is actually happening. In the end, the environment is as important (if not more important, depending on the circumstance) as what is being studied. In Charles Baudelaire’s “To a Passerby,” he provides a glimpse at this analysis, through his documentation of a woman he had never met