“When a book and a head collide and there is a hollow sound, is it always the book?”Georg Christoph Lichtenberg · Caietele de însemnări · 1799 · Caietul K, însemnarea 18
When a book sounds hollow on impact, the hollowness may be in your head.
The image is comic: two heads colliding produce a hollow sound — but which one is hollow? Lichtenberg flips the reflex of blaming the object. A book may be dense, while the head meeting it half-prepared hears only emptiness. A modernist novel abandoned at page thirty as boring may simply demand a different kind of attention than the one judging it.
Why it matters A good antidote to the reflex of quickly dismissing a difficult work or idea as empty.