The Interpreted World is the nascent brainchild of Mollie Eisenberg (hello, people who have googled me! You turn up on my referral logs and I wonder who you are), a first-year graduate student in English at Princeton University. Quite honestly, I’m still figuring out what the brainchild is going to be when she grows up.

The premise of this site is that the act of interpretation is the primary act: that it is not just how we decide what we think about things, but also how we think about things, how we group the things we think about and reorganize them for future thinking. If the interpretive process is the algorithm through which we process our experience, assimilating information, ordering it, adding the resulting conclusions to the set of things we know, that algorithm is nothing less than the essential self.

The Interpreted World is inspired by the first section of the first of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, which seems to me to be about the difficulty of being a human and trying to make art, whether “art” is a book, a painting, a sculpture, a play, or a coherent understanding of the world, a life.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic
orders? And even if one of them pressed me
suddenly to his heart: I’d be consumed
in his stronger existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we can just barely endure,
and we stand in awe of it as it coolly disdains
to destroy us. Every angel is terrifying.
      And so I check myself and swallow the luring call
of dark sobs. Alas, whom can we turn to
in our need? Not angels, not humans,
and the sly animals see at once
how little at home we are
in the interpreted world. That leaves us
some tree on a hillside, on which our eyes fasten
day after day; leaves us yesterday’s street
and the coddled loyalty of an old habit
that liked it here, stayed on, and never left.
      O and the night, the night, when the wind full of worldspace
gnaws at our faces—, for whom won’t the night be there,
desired, gently disappointing, a hard rendezvous
for each toiling heart. Is it easier for lovers?
Ah, but they only use each other to hide what awaits them.
      You still don’t see? Cast the emptiness from your arms
into the spaces we breathe: perhaps the birds
will sense the increase of air with more passionate flying.

     

From The First Elegy, Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Edward Snow