It cracks me up when readers cling tightly to a writer's every word, as if the secrets to the universe are contained in the page, and if only one squints hard enough, with enough concentration, one's skull will be flooded with the Truth. And then if the writer's thought patterns are a little too disorderly, or the writer is using obtuse language, then dammit, to hell with it! One shouldn't have to exert oneself so much for the Truth hmm?
Here I can laugh at myself as well; every once in a while I catch myself indulging in the old habit.
What people sometimes forget is that an intellectual work takes quite a bit of exercise on the part of the writer, and on the part of the reader too. To clearly articulate a given subject, you have to continuously study it, so as to keep its facts and concepts clearly fixed in your mind. Otherwise it begins to fade, and you have to labor much harder to recollect it, or otherwise piece it together in a haphazard fashion.
Further, your concepts for understanding and articulating a given subject strengthen and become more sophisticated over time. Sometimes you have to leave a subject entirely and strengthen your concepts in another sphere, and then come back later with cleared eyes.
Any written work can be seen as a multidisciplinary feat, with various skills, stylistic tendencies, language pools, knowledge structures, and emotional states working together to produce a coherent work that is produced by a human being with strengths and weaknesses, and an incomplete perception of the universe.
In the same way, the reader must constantly put the work in to build up concepts of her or his own, so as to better understand what the writer is trying to articulate. And at the same time, one will not magically become the writer and understand everything the writer has to say. One has to settle taking away what one finds worthwhile and resonant. Certainly some works have a greater power and a wider resonance than others, but that is another story.
The Truth (or small-t "truths") does not arrive on a silver platter. Well, usually. But this also does not excuse the writer from doing her or his explanatory chin-ups, to extend the exercising metaphor. The writer needs to reach out to the reader, just as the reader must reach out to the writer. If one cannot clearly articulate what one means to a fair amount of people, one should not be surprised when readers begin putting their books down, shaking their heads, and leaving to try something else.
