The uses of literature

 To me, the idea is that when you read something, it makes you think of something else analogous to what you are reading. It is a lateral move to something else.  

I found this document I was writing about poetic intuitions

Here is part 16:

16. I feel that if I enumerate too many examples, the category itself will dissipate. Why isn’t everything I see and feel a poetic insight? Would that be a bad thing? 

 

My grandfather taught my father to think like an accountant. My father, as a child of 12 maybe, wondered why a certain street car company claimed to be losing money, and my grandfather, a CPA sent him to the library to research it. It turned out that the parent company was charging its own subsidiary an inflated price for something or another, thus turning a profit into a loss through accounting trickery. My father was not an accountant like my grandfather, but a sociologist who taught me how to think like a sociologist. Consider someone who moves from the to West to the East coast and finds customs strange and different there. He moves back again to the West after ten years and finds that some peculiarly Eastern mores are now entrenched in the West too. What has happened? 

 

Thinking like a poet is a kind of professional deformation, like thinking like an accountant or a sociologist. There is also a kind of poetry in thinking like an accountant, though. We cannot define what it is to think like a poet, because all thinking like this is poetic.