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.
The Author Who, for Example, Says Something…
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.