Category: Notes

Another by Louis Lavelle:

Nous avons plus d’émotion à retrouver dans un auteur les sentiments que nous éprouvons en secret que ceux dont nous témoignons, ceux qui sont en nous en germe que ceux qui ont déjà éclos. Les œuvres de l’esprit ont pour objet un monde que nous portons en nous et qui est souvent invisible à nos propres yeux ; l’auteur qui nous le révèle acquiert du premier coup avec nous une intimité mystérieuse.

The fascinating thing about literature is that it allows us to absorb experiences that we would never have had in life. To a certain extent, it plays the same role as external circumstances, stimulating feelings, reactions and thoughts within us that need a specific stimulus to appear. Understanding grows with the comprehension of new possibilities and, as has been said, we create a bond with the author who reveals them that is difficult to explain.

Says Lavelle:

Le premier devoir de l’écrivain doit être de s’élever assez au-dessus de toutes les circonstances de sa vie particulière pour fournir à tous les êtres un appui de tous les instants et les montrer à eux-mêmes tels qu’ils voudraient être toujours.

This duty is perhaps the most difficult, because “rising above all circumstances” involves first understanding them, and understanding how they perhaps fit into the bigger picture of individual existence, and only then, having extracted a crystal-clear meaning from them, is to think about how this meaning can be transplanted to the general human experience. And communicate it! In fact, there is no human experience, no matter how individual, whose meaning cannot be extracted in different circumstances; what is difficult, however, is to see the big in the small, something we have grown unaccustomed to doing.

As Lavelle rightly pointed out, the best books do not reveal something unknown to us, but something we already know intimately and which, due to a sudden illumination, we seem to discover. The best books, then, only shed light on something hidden inside us. The curious thing about this is that the sensation of discovering something we already know makes a very strong impression on our minds, much greater than learning something really new and unknown. And at the same time as we immediately identify with the idea, we also immediately establish a point of contact with the author.