The author who, for example, says something already said by one author, and then says something already said by another, has produced something new: creating a new unity, can already be considered original. It is the same with style, which is almost always a kind of blend, a kind of personal concatenation of different traits learned from different sources which, together, acquire an unprecedented unity. Just as one does not create from nothing, what one creates only consciously dispenses the quality of creation.
It is always a great challenge to balance…
It is always a great challenge to balance conflicting tensions when a predominant tendency manifests itself in the spirit, either compelling externalization or internalization. The personality often reveals this difficulty, the main problem of which is not to follow or move away from the innate tendency, but to deal with the opposite, which often presents itself as a duty. A duty, then, to act against one’s nature, to continually do the most painful thing, under constant threat of condemnation by one’s conscience! Perhaps this is the greatest usefulness of biographies: to record the sprouts of this conflict in the lives of those for whom living is opposed to doing work.
At the Same Time as It Seems Impossible…
At the same time as it seems impossible for a writer today to draft a line without the help of a computer, that is, without this wonderful tool that makes it possible to have a mountain of data organized, accessible and, above all, in which anything can be researched in seconds, there is the fact that neither this nor any automation is put to good use when one does not know how to carry out the process without it. In other words: one must take advantage of it, but not depend on it to get the job done; which means, in short, understanding its possibilities and limitations.
Having Overcome the Initial Awe…
Having overcome the initial awe, imagining the states of ecstasy described by Nicolae Steinhardt when he was imprisoned is quite instructive. After we stop questioning the plausibility of the accounts, or rather, after we accept them, we realize that it is precisely in the most extreme deprivation, in the most acute suffering, that supreme relief can be found. When life is reduced to its rudiments, we see clearly what is most important, we see how much of this life is superfluous, what justifies it and what must be preserved. But the grace, above all, is to see that the most extreme and suffocating misery is neither absolute nor the last word.