Various experiments have led me to think that the best narrative requires methodical structuring. It is true: one makes prose free-minded, letting it flow, with interesting results. Yet the effect of a narrative is almost always weaker if we notice major structural lapses in it. Why is it tepid? Why is it unconvincing? We often find the answer in its sequence, in the way it is organized and progresses. By the side of the artist, it seems interesting to sit down and build with total freedom, unattached to structural ties. However, there seems to be a lure there. Great art seems to require an omniscient artist who, at every step, strives to simulate the naturalness of what he is creating.
Category: Notes
The Image We Make of Authors and Works Comes to Life and Moves
The image we make of authors and works, over time, comes to life and moves. So we can experience impressions that are impossible in the instant contiguous to contact with them, impressions that require distancing and maturation. If, on the one hand, these impressions can expand our understanding, on the other they can take us away from what is most important. Therefore, of those that are dear to us, rereading is a mandatory task.
“I Believe in the Future of Mankind”
A congress that brought together all those who claim to believe in the future of mankind would undoubtedly end in a terrible riot. Heated discussions, blood-stained faces and angry looks: this is the only way it could happen. The psychology of someone who worships words like “future” and “progress” is very simple. This person takes himself seriously, believes in himself, has “convictions.” To believe in the future of mankind is to believe in oneself as a transforming agent, to have solutions and want to propose them, defend them, fighting whoever presents opposition. “I believe in the future of mankind,” says someone, and the intelligent listener already infers “and you should believe too!”.
How Is It Possible?
“Man never assumes himself to be unintelligent”—so I said, and I add: it was the greatest humiliation for me to discover myself, as an adult, an illiterate. I was absolutely humiliated to find myself unable to read in my own language and, therefore, I found myself exactly illiterate. Intolerable! A single resource of style—those present in every sentence of a great writer—deprived me of the meaning of a period—a real terror to judge the dictionary itself useless!—But why do I say this? Realizing me ignorant, I began to study grammar with almost religious fervor. Today, the surprise: these boring books have seemed enjoyable to me. How is it possible?