Everything You Care About Is a Cliché
And there's nothing wrong with that!
Look, I wish there were an easier way to say this: All your most profound experiences and deeply cherished beliefs are—no offense—kind of boring. Like, oh, you also love your family a lot, are afraid of dying, and believe that, deep down, all of humanity is in this thing together? I'm sorry, but…fucking snoozefest.
Yet as hollow as these platitudes ring in most of our ears, we’ve surely all felt them at some point—felt them deeply and sincerely. Even Toni Morrison admits, “My stories come to me as clichés. A cliché is a cliché because it’s worthwhile. Otherwise, it would have been discarded.” Part of the reason hackneyed ideas and phrases continue to circulate, in other words, is that they continue to resonate, year after year, generation after generation.
The problem with clichés is not that they are untrue; it’s that they drain the truth of its umami: the pungent, crunchy flavor of reality. As Donald Barthelme writes, “the world enters the work as it enters our ordinary lives, not as world-view or system but in sharp particularity.” William Carlos Williams put it more bluntly: “No ideas but in things.” It is specificity—details, examples, signature phrases—that allows otherwise bland material to shine in all its universal brilliance. This is because when we outfit clichés in the regalia of their own quirks and situations, we provide something undeniably real, something the receiver can’t help but respond to.
What I mean is: In laying bare the tragic scene of your unconditional love, in recounting the unbelievable details of your brush with death, in documenting the ecstatic recognition of your oneness with the universe, you force your audience to hold up that image up against their own analogous encounters. This appeal to firsthand experience is reflexive, maybe even unconscious at times—and naturally far more compelling than a generic claim about “love” or “death” or “oneness.” Ironically, the concrete and idiosyncratic is your best hope of capturing the deep truth or universal moral you were trying to convey all along.
So when it comes to that special class of ideas that are simultaneously profound and utterly banal, what’s a person to do? The answer is as old as time: A singular perspective, refracted through the prism of another, scatters their light anew.