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.
Tag: literature
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.
While It Is True That the Writer…
While it is true that the writer, unlike the public man, does not usually receive the reward of his work in this life, it is also true that he is practically immune to everything that would destroy the career of the latter. Often, the opposite is true, and those traits of conduct or personality that, to a public man, would be a certain scandal, take on an intriguing character. In this sense, the writer is privileged and enjoys the advantage of not having to falsify himself in order to exercise his profession.