>>24489662I appreciate the bold takes, but disagree completely. Literature is rooted in language, in particular metaphor; our tastes as readers vary, and some love the more grounded and soulful epic/classic while others prefer ambitious modern novels that strive to push the form to its limits, but in general a better book will be founded on grander and/or tighter metaphors, i.e. attempts to share complex things by comparing them to things each party already understands.
In this sense math and lit are very similar: both abstract from shared concrete concepts because they are the most natural and practical way to share difficult ideas (in math/phil) or rarefied feelings (in e.g. a great novel). That's the reason mathfags so often have an edge when reading difficult fiction, not because of the direct relevance of any specific branch (another necessary metaphor!) of math, but the mindset that math training instills. If you can DERIVE something useful and mutually communicable from phrases in math papers like "...over an open field" (when there's not a blade of grass in sight), you're PRIMED to grasp books that on the surface couldn't be further from the cold formality of math, like Proust. Mathematical thinking allows one to pin down those metaphors, compare them to others, and more generally to do useful intellectual work with cultural and emotional material and later apply that new-learned framework to others.
Math is closer to the human spirit, and lit more distant, than you think, and as both get closer to the cutting edge, they converge still more explicitly.
