It is amazing to note the contrast between ancient and modern texts. There is in the ancients an innocence—at least, this seems to us to be the right word—that causes us strangeness. We cannot understand them: there are texts that sound to us like they were written by children, or by beings from another race, inhabitants of another world. More: the ancients, for the most part, almost always sought to deal with the essential—something very rare in modern times, where literature is devoted to the trivial. The ancient texts are distinguished by the expression of an admiration, a reverence toward the reality that seems unimaginable to us. Modern man is devoid of the faculty of wonder: for him, existence is tedious and the world boring, old and banal.
Tag: literature
The Best Narrative Requires Methodical Structuring
Various experiments have led me to think that the best narrative requires methodical structuring. It is true: one makes prose free-minded, letting it flow, with interesting results. Yet the effect of a narrative is almost always weaker if we notice major structural lapses in it. Why is it tepid? Why is it unconvincing? We often find the answer in its sequence, in the way it is organized and progresses. By the side of the artist, it seems interesting to sit down and build with total freedom, unattached to structural ties. However, there seems to be a lure there. Great art seems to require an omniscient artist who, at every step, strives to simulate the naturalness of what he is creating.
The Image We Make of Authors and Works Comes to Life and Moves
The image we make of authors and works, over time, comes to life and moves. So we can experience impressions that are impossible in the instant contiguous to contact with them, impressions that require distancing and maturation. If, on the one hand, these impressions can expand our understanding, on the other they can take us away from what is most important. Therefore, of those that are dear to us, rereading is a mandatory task.
How Is It Possible?
“Man never assumes himself to be unintelligent”—so I said, and I add: it was the greatest humiliation for me to discover myself, as an adult, an illiterate. I was absolutely humiliated to find myself unable to read in my own language and, therefore, I found myself exactly illiterate. Intolerable! A single resource of style—those present in every sentence of a great writer—deprived me of the meaning of a period—a real terror to judge the dictionary itself useless!—But why do I say this? Realizing me ignorant, I began to study grammar with almost religious fervor. Today, the surprise: these boring books have seemed enjoyable to me. How is it possible?