A person with some education does not interrupt another on the telephone; but he interrupts, without fearing for an instant, one who is thinking, as soon as he has the slightest and most insignificant communicative impulse. From this one can only conclude that thinking is a disease, and that normal people are not used to it; otherwise they would certainly know that a “excuse me” or an “I beg your pardon” in no way lessens the violent and abrupt cut they operate in the flow of ideas, which may never return. Neither morals nor conventions have taken care of this incomparable inconvenience: there are no restraints of any kind on the person who feels the desire to approach a stranger; quite the contrary, it is the stranger who will seem rude if he does not pay attention to the one who demands it. And, finally, how much satisfaction it gave to see for the first time that Karl Kraus noticed it! It is a subject for a whole book, and yet everyone seems accustomed to hearing news when they go to the barbershop; to being approached insistently by anyone who comes forward with the intention of selling. Well done, well done!
Category: Notes
Doctor Faustus, by Thomas Mann
The main problem with this work is expectation: it is the novel of an author who, twenty years earlier, published The Magic Mountain. We expect, then, that these two decades will be reflected in maturity and higher altitudes—something that does not happen, Mann seeming instead to have come down from the mountain. Doctor Faustus is a fine example of the authentically German defects: it is a work of almost fifty chapters that would be much better and more powerful if summarized in three. Its climax consists of the invocation of the devil, a character that is always interesting in itself. If the work was reduced to this moment and its consequences, perhaps we would have a different impression; but Mann makes sure to bore us with a few hundred idle pages. What to say? Carpeaux compared this work to Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, saying that both authors took refuge in music. But oh, how different! It seems impossible to compare them without leaving Doctor Faustus completely humiliated: this is a work devoid of elevation, boasting a mediocre thoroughness, as written by the bourgeois who entertains himself by displaying useless knowledge and writes as a hobby. What a disappointment! It seems inevitable to imagine Mann, in his luxurious mansions, overcome by a boredom similar to that of the old Indians, unable to perceive himself fading the more he allowed himself to “take refuge.” It hurts to see him in this great writer…
Moralism Is the First Step
Moralism is the first step in an intellectual trajectory that cannot be reduced to moralism. It is necessary for the moralist to go a step further, and go beyond the findings coming from the analysis of the world: he must transform and detach from it if he wants to progress. But it is difficult to concentrate on evolving, overcoming, forgetting, by placing a stone over what once deserved attention; to do so seems like a betrayal of his own nature, a denial of the past, and a devaluation of what the mind has produced. Wrong judgments, however. Intellectual life is justifiable only as long as it moves, and the intellectual only as long as he allows himself to create.
Technicism, in Literature, Is Only to Be Tolerated…
It is true that, in addressing any topic, the writer can make it interesting by giving it depth or, rather, by showing himself as an expert on the subject. However, there is a limit which, if crossed, makes the text dull to an unbearable level. Technicism, in literature, is only to be tolerated when it reinforces the peculiarity of the expression that is independent of it; more often than not, what it does is to make the lines insipid for those unfamiliar with the area being dealt with. Unfortunately, this is a difficult mistake to avoid for someone who has dedicated himself to a certain subject and then decides to dramatize it. But it is good to keep in mind that great literature is not produced for specialists because, after all, we hardly call a specialist one who is one in the essential.