The artist who aspires to success while alive deserves it, and deserves it because art is a very difficult choice. However, such an artist can never, ever aspire to a position among the greatest, since supreme art expects nothing and has nothing to expect. Art, in its most authentic manifestation, is the expression that springs from a need and has as its purpose the expression itself. It matters little the means by which it expresses itself, or the techniques it uses: these are mere details which, when over-emphasized, obscure this self-evident truth: great art is not made on a whim.
On the Threshold Between Cowardice and Courage
It takes an ophidic coolness and very solid values to, in an extreme situation of imminent risk, reflect in an instant and make the right decision. Situations like these, where a man finds himself on the threshold between cowardice and courage, are often keys to a biography, and their effects last for as long as a life is extended. It is like the hunter who, with his rifle unloaded, is surprised by a hungry tiger: the shot imposes itself, and there is no avoiding it; the gaze fixed on the beast shows a false move to be death; and, with a racing heart, the man has to decide.
The Freedom to Think
It is true: nothing seems so intolerable and so revolting as the oppression that wants to take away from man what is perhaps the only thing truly his: the freedom to think. Such violence is nothing but an onslaught that, when carried out, results in the annulment of the individual. A whipped, mutilated or violated man does not lose, in any way, that which consists in his essence, therefore these aggressions seem much lighter when we confront them with the suppression of his thought. That is to say: man, forbidden to think freely, loses his human dimension and comes close to being an animal.
Honor Claims Civil Disobedience
There is, as Thoreau says, a time when honor claims intransigent civil disobedience, even though the punishment for such behavior is jail or the gallows. This thing called democracy perhaps sums up its value in having replaced declared tyrannies, or rather, in having the knowledge of the latter made “democrats” out of many men of valor. So we see that, in practice, tyranny has done nothing but change its name. It is impossible not to think of Kafka when we confront such democracy with the solitary individual. If we think, for example, of the immense oppressive power of the State machine or, more specifically, of the enlightened ones in robes, who enforce whatever they want, we see on the other side a nothing on his knees, tied up and under the double threat of the whip and the gag. Yet now, in a mix of Kafkaesque plot and nuances of Orwell and Huxley, oppression is delivered in packages as affable as they are false. To understand it and accept it willingly is to throw honor and the faculty of thought in the trash.