There are things too large for us to handle. There are things that overwhelm us. There are things that can take us away, break us, twist us, keep us alive. There are things in this world that need to be done and aren’t, things that shouldn’t be done and are. There are worlds within our world that are incorrigibly plural, there are worlds born dead and still living. What I am trying to say is that there are things that make you ask, what does it mean? 

The faithful work of interpretation asks what they are trying to truly say, between these lines? Let us drown ourselves in the text, in the line breaks, the commas and periods, the diction and word choice. Let us bury anything that we do not understand.

Herein is the first principle of OneFiveHundred: it is okay to not understand things. I will not tell you the hidden meaning. I will ascribe to Sontag’s command that “in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” I will begin with the sensory experience of the work, what it brings to me & why I think about it nonstop. I will show it as itself. I will talk about one small thing.

There will be 5 sections (ish).
There will be 1500 words (ish).
One, Five, Hundred. 1,500.

If we ascribe to Sontag, we begin from the principle that one needs to “see more, hear more,  feel more”, so why do we not begin with something magnificent, instead of something small (a fact, a flower, a fizz post)? To begin with the smallest thing is an exercise in paying attention. Attention is an antidote or counter to distraction. We are bombarded with distraction in our lives. We listen to music when we walk to class, we look at TikTok, Reels, we watch YouTube during our meals, we post on Fizz for karma. If we are to see more, we must begin by consuming less, by sensitizing ourselves to the real world that lies all around us.

“It is not desirable to confine knowledge to whatever can be put into a useful shape for examinations, drawing-rooms, or the still more pretentious modes of publicity,” T.S. Eliot says in Tradition and the Individual Talent. OneFiveHundred is an attempt to answer this call. What can I hold in my hand and make bloom outwards until it touches some unknown corner of your life? One small thing. Five sections. 1500 words.

OneFiveHundred is a series by Wild Grain Editor Hongtao Hu, all thoughts are his own and not necessarily representative of  The Wild Grain or the Rice University English Department.