Writing, Human Connection

“You read something that you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important.” -James Baldwin

The quiet, aching miracle of literature is that across languages, centuries, borders, and lives so different from ours, there’s a shared heartbeat. Reading becomes a kind of silent conversation where someone, somewhere, reaches out and says, “You’re not alone.” We read to know we are not alone. Just like Baldwin says, you read a book published in 1811, written by someone whose world is completely, utterly different than yours, and yet, you find pieces of yourself there. You realize that human emotions — grief, longing, anger, hope — don't belong to one time, one culture, or one kind of life. They thread through time, linking strangers across miles and centuries.

I recently became obsessed with Annie Ernaux's memoirs, and there was a certain line about her mother working, selling stuff just so Ernaux could go to college, sit in class, and learn about Plato, and this was about her life in the 1950s in a French village. This made me emotional, despite differences in language, upbringing, and geography, we somehow both have wrestled with the same questions about existence, purpose, and belonging. Her works collapse the distance between years and whole worlds, and it feels like someone reaching through time to touch your shoulder to say that they understand.

The conversation surrounding writing, as it's seen as a job and nothing else, that therefore it is okay to let AI handle perfecting its mistakes, is degrading. A writer says, in this phenomenal article in The Verge: “It’s just words, she thought. It’s my story, my characters, my world. I came up with it. So what if a computer wrote them?” using a website called Sudowrite which analyzes your style, metaphors and rewrite your 'lame' story into a readable one. She asks the same questions as everyone else of course, plagiarism or cheating is not new to the world, people always needed help from one way or another. So what if a robot does it? You can't exploit it as it's not a human, and it does everything for free, what else?

For me, the thing that is ignored is that AI will never replace the intention behind every word that is used in a work, the endeavor of the readers to understand their meaning. Reading a novel about grief that is written by AI will not, cannot give the same impact. A robot does not know how it feels to lose someone, or the agonizing weeks that follow it. It can copy your emotions, your words, and make them so grammatically correct and perfect. But humans are not. We do not know what to say when we lose someone, or even have any clue how to explain our affectionate feelings to other people. Even this article I am writing is all over the place, it jumps from one topic to another in a second. Humans are messy and chaotic, they make mistakes just to learn from them and do it again.

The courage it takes for writers to be vulnerable enough to name those feelings, to bring private, often painful emotions into the public space, is profound. Their talent gives us words when we have none. In every chapter, every confession, every carefully chosen word, we hear an echo of our own lives. We are reminded that our fears, our sorrows, our dreams are not strange or isolated. When you feel the pain or the struggle that a writer is going through, to try to find the words even if it is not perfect, you say; Others have felt this too — and survived. What else?