The impressive thing about habit is that it accustoms the mind to difficult tasks, making them seem almost, almost easy; and even if it does not go that far, it trivializes doing them, something extraordinary in itself. Psychologically, getting used to doing something means doing it with less effort, like switching on an automatic execution mode. And it is only possible to see how beneficial, how powerful a habit is when one breaks it and then tries to do what one used to do naturally. Almost always, the effort needed to pick it up is less than the effort needed to give it up.
The Commitment Not to Give Up…
The commitment not to give up is the beginning and the harbinger of literary work. Without it, what is done does not become a work, but merely something fleeting and equally disposable. It is only this commitment that will sustain the effort when circumstances sabotage it, when the will to write itself fails. It is this that motivates habit, and it is only this that restores normality when habit, violated, transmutes a state of productive inertia into absolute torpor.
It Is Really Impressive to Contrast…
It is really impressive to contrast the harmless appearance of letters with their marvelous power of evocation. In fact, their ability to describe precisely and in detail is unparalleled, allowing the mind to produce vivid images that can always be recalled. It is enough to think back to Dostoevsky’s Petersburg, dark and snow-covered, with open taverns and coachmen passing to and fro; the Brazilian hinterland, the suburbs of London, Lisbon and the Alto Minho… all of this appears with impressive vividness, accompanied by the emotional charge coming from the setting evoked. The numerous characters, their choices and their mishaps, the ever particular atmosphere that emanates from each work… It is, in fact, thanks to letters, a life created, mentally lived and assimilated, whose impressions are remembered forever. And all of this is unsuspected by anyone who does not read.
Every Preface Is More or Less Useless
Every preface is more or less useless, and because that is the norm, it is natural that, from the very first line, it tends to bore the reader. In other words: if something really important is to be said about the work, let it be said there. However, the practice legitimizes prefaces, even if they rarely prove useful. But there are prefaces, God!, there are prefaces which, not satisfied with their own uselessness, want to jeopardize the work that has not even begun! There is nothing more annoying than this idle display of erudition, which fills the lines with foreign terms and pretends to express a depth that the work itself is incapable of. We read them and we feel imbued with an immediate and one hundred percent unnecessary antipathy towards the author. The question is: why, God, why?