The Writer’s First Duty

Says Lavelle:

Le premier devoir de l’écrivain doit être de s’élever assez au-dessus de toutes les circonstances de sa vie particulière pour fournir à tous les êtres un appui de tous les instants et les montrer à eux-mêmes tels qu’ils voudraient être toujours.

This duty is perhaps the most difficult, because “rising above all circumstances” involves first understanding them, and understanding how they perhaps fit into the bigger picture of individual existence, and only then, having extracted a crystal-clear meaning from them, is to think about how this meaning can be transplanted to the general human experience. And communicate it! In fact, there is no human experience, no matter how individual, whose meaning cannot be extracted in different circumstances; what is difficult, however, is to see the big in the small, something we have grown unaccustomed to doing.

The Best Books Do Not Reveal Something Unknown

As Lavelle rightly pointed out, the best books do not reveal something unknown to us, but something we already know intimately and which, due to a sudden illumination, we seem to discover. The best books, then, only shed light on something hidden inside us. The curious thing about this is that the sensation of discovering something we already know makes a very strong impression on our minds, much greater than learning something really new and unknown. And at the same time as we immediately identify with the idea, we also immediately establish a point of contact with the author.

Ideas Do Not Die Easily

In 1951, Juan José López Ibor noted that, at least since 1945, there had been those who considered psychoanalysis to be “definitivamente muerto. Polvo y ceniza”, then declaring: “el ciclo psicoanalítico está terminado”. And yet, there it is… What is most striking about this, and other cases, is that it does not make the slightest difference if an idea, theory or doctrine is intellectually refuted and destroyed: once conceived, its survival will depend on other factors than its solidity in the intellectual field.

More unjustifiable than the obsession…

More unjustifiable than the obsession with originality is the embarrassment arising from the realization that what was said now had already been said a long time ago. What to say? The author who, recording his own impressions, notices something that has already been noticed before, instead of being embarrassed that he was not the first, or that he did not know the primary source—which is often untraceable—should be satisfied with having come to the same conclusion through direct perception, rejoicing as do those who find something in common in the other.