The merit of detaching oneself from the present seems to lie precisely in the difficulty of doing so. A life dedicated to the future or, in other words, a life centered on what remains—this is the ideal scenario. It so happens that, against one’s will, the present is always interfering, and one might wonder if literature does not depend on this shock, which ends up exposing the problem of impermanence. That is to say: beyond the expressive need, literature is born out of a need for preservation. The further he moves away from both, the more the artist will deteriorate. And so, even if one can idealize a scenario where efforts converge entirely on the enduring, it seems somehow necessary for the present to repeatedly remind one of its reason.
Category: Notes
Would Go to Jail
It is impressive to note how easily writers of the last two centuries would go to jail if they published today what they published a few decades ago. They would be fiercely persecuted, fiercely censored, and, unless saved by a very rare confluence of factors, would be prevented from writing and publishing. Dead, however, with a few exceptions, they remain tolerated, if not ignored. This highlights both the hysterical and authoritarian character of this century, and it has become more than ever preferable to remain anonymous.
Information Warfare
What makes information warfare even more abominable than that waged on battlefields is the absence of any war code. Consequently, anything is allowed. What is astonishing is the number of those who have not yet realized that there is, in fact, a war going on in this field. This is mostly because none of those who fight fiercely has published, as protocol demands, a declaration of war. So that those who innocently stand in their way are attacked by a total violence that has no scruple to destroy and admits no amnesty. To crush the adversary, and to do so by any means available, preferably sneakily, so that the aggression will not be identified or, at the very least, it will be impossible to identify the aggressor. It is a war that, in short, has added infamy to pure violence.
Less the Man Than His State of Nerves
Style, says Brodsky, is less the man than his state of nerves. Very well observed! And it is possible to go a step further by saying that there is, in every writer, the man who lives and the man who writes—or, in other words, the man who thinks and the man who acts. Style is, to a great extent, the emotional and psychological effect triggered by the act of writing. The moralist is bitter because it is precisely bitterness that fills him when he writes about what he writes about. Likewise a grandiose style reveals a sense of grandeur. The poet is a feigner, says a verse by Pessoa—but only to a certain extent. Invariably, one can only express what one can feel.