Literature, unable as it has become to be a profession, can only generate maladjusted and abnormal types. Because, after all, practicing it is no less than working with no expectation of return, something that nobody consciously does. The writer therefore detaches part of his time from “normal life”, and the greater this part, the more authentically he is a writer, the further he will stray from the norm, the more abnormal he will become. There is no solution. And if the tendency for him to fail in leading an ordinary life is almost unavoidable, at least it has become easier to verify the sincerity of his vocation.
Tag: literature
Sometimes It Is Strange to Get Used…
Sometimes it is strange to get used to the heroes of great literature, and then turn our eyes to the real example of an ordinary failed life. In great literature, the hero may not always venture out as Joseph Campbell would have it, but he is not wrong to note that the hero tends to evolve and learn. This is, in fact, the expected effect of years in the course of a life. Then we see the real example of someone who does not seem to have learned anything, who has not matured at all; someone who stumbled when he was young and continues to stumble when he is old. It is strange because it seems an almost insulting waste, a fierce, inhuman refusal to learn lessons from experience. That is the only real failure: not making the most of what was lived.
The Long Walk, by Slavomir Rawicz
A narrative like this can hardly be matched by pure fiction. To do so, the writer has to use extreme skill in dosing the drama of the plot, so that it does not sound exaggerated, but at the same time moves and convinces. Very, very difficult… because sometimes the drama is concentrated in the unsaid, the not possible or not attempted, in what did not happen. On the other hand, we have this impressive narrative, in which what is reported appears with the exact weight of what happened. Exaggerations are methodically dispensed with, and yet, with each chapter, each page, the impression is that the narrative is always going to extremes, and the reader has to make an effort to imagine the degree of intensity of that which could be expressed with numerous exclamations. What is artistic artifice in the face of such an experience?
There Are Authors With Truly Impressive…
There are authors with truly impressive powers of assimilation, and we realize that they often cannot define whether the ideas they express are their own or come from the references they reveal. Of course, there is some foundation for true learning. In order for an idea to be grasped, it has to be felt as one’s own, even if it is later abandoned. Ideally, however, the greatest intellectual will be the one who encompasses everything and absorbs everything; thus, since nothing is foreign to him, he is able to express everything as his own.