Connecting with Classics

I like this bit in George Saunders’s latest newsletter. If you don’t connect with a classic story, it can be really insightful to dig into why:

A failure to connect with a story might teach us something about the story but it can also teach us something about its reader. And any work of art can teach us something deep about ourselves, by way of our reaction to it. But this is only true if we stick with it – try every entryway into the work that we can think of. We might set it aside, respectfully, with a feeling of, “Sorry, not ready for you. I’ll come back to you someday.” Or we might try to read it from a slightly more technical position, using some of the tools we’ve discussed here.

And:

This is all, I think, especially true once a work has stood the test of time; a form of due diligence, so that we don’t, in our spirited opinionatedness, override the wisdom of readers and critics who have, in fact, worked harder than we have to find the good in that particular work of art.