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Such Movement...

Alessandro Pennini
Jun 19, 2016
3 min read

“This book really moved me”

At this juncture, I am awfully sick of hearing the above sentence uttered when describing a quote, passage, sentence, verb, clause, phrase, etc et al all of the above.

I am sick of it because it is often uttered by people who are moved by the slightest emotional shake the arts gives them and are so easily swayed that everything is melodrama to them. MasterChef winners, karma, all that suburban Facebook sharing naff, it’s so trite and sickening. People like this allow Buzzfeed and Pedestrian TV to keep pumping out lists of ‘Heartwarming’ things and allow me to consider a career in vigilantism.

The statement also sickens me because if you attempt to disagree with these emotionally o’erfilled readers, you come across as a Dickensian-like miser of emotion, denying all warmth and love, revealing your coal heart to the world for powering their emotional engines. And I for one am rather sick of being made out to be some sort of emotionless, unfeeling being simply because the latest memoir about another bloody person having another bloody disease made you feel something other than contentment with the world.

Suppose for a second you were moved by a book – you’d have gained my ire but bear with me - If you’re moved by a book, by the logic of that statement you were somewhere and the book shifted you slightly elsewhere. You are emotionally not you were not before. But any emotion other than complete and utter neutrality is being moved. Humour is being moved, discomfort, even being interested. It is impossible to not be moved when reading a book at all, boredom in itself is being moved; towards boredom but nevertheless, motion.

The people I oft hear saying this are predictable in what moves them and doesn’t: human interest. And when people say they were moved by a book it is usually one emotion they are talking about: sadness. This has to do with the types of literature that produce this move-ed feel; memoirs, autobiographies chiefly, and often about people overcoming stuff or having a disease.

Go to any local bookstore in the city – providing you can find one, they’re a lost breed like the punks that used to sit on Flinders Street steps – and look at the ratio of fiction to non-fiction. It’s usually sitting at a 4:1 ration. For every shelf of fiction, four shelves of non-fiction. Then look at biographies, memoirs. We are obsessed with memoirs of diseases and overcoming things. Overcoming bankruptcy, yourself, expectations, family, diet. You can tell a lot about the current state of human evolution by the bookstores and the top sellers: books about cutting out sugar, bringing sugar back, losing weight, gaining finance and disease porn.

And apparently we’re so obsessed with being happy and distracted that any glimpse of something remotely not happy is enough to be equated with ‘moving’. I often see that word trotted out every summer for the ‘summer reading lists’ along with moving’s cellmates ‘could not put it down’, ‘must-read’ and ‘spellbinding’. To any alert reader, these words should be blacklisted as they usually indicate a dismaying lack of quality and act as a warning to any emotional miser: you will be moved.

Damn to that I say. I’d much rather a book make me uncomfortable, angry, curious, distracted, I’d much rather be intrigued and begin the search for more. Books that move you do only that: move and once out of sight, they are out of mind. Books should demand attention from you and force you to consider what the bloody hell you just read. Books should not exist only to move, but to make one curious or offended or worried about the world. To hell with being moved, I want to know something more about it all.