True artists and true philosophers have in common that their work is the result of reflection on experience. From this, in both, springs the need for expression which, in each, is realized differently. In other words: it is through reflection that they discover what to say, and afterwards that they experience the sensation of having to say it. The rest is how to do it – the least important thing. But this initial impulse that unites them attests to the truth of what they do and sets them apart from all those who, for the most diverse reasons, perpetuate falsification.
Tag: literature
Twentieth-Century Literature Discovered…
Twentieth-century literature discovered that, in order to win over the common man, it is infinitely easier to descend to his level rather than elevate him. It is a remarkable discovery. When one says the greatest conceivable banality in the most prosaic way imaginable, something impressive, almost magical, happens and brings the common man to his knees. Finally, with his eyes sparkling, he experiences the sensation of understanding what he is reading! It is an infallible formula, and to it is added the pleasure of curiosity in seeing the spectacle of artists who, as if inside a sanctuary, behave as if they were at a fair. It is undoubtedly a kind of literature that can exert an unparalleled fascination on the ordinary man.
Brazilian Modernism
Brazilian Modernism did literature a great service by proving once and for all how dull, uninteresting and tedious the futile is, and how impossible it is to change it, even for creative minds. It is ordinary poetry, intended for ordinary people, but poetry that does not uplift them, stimulate them or make them think. False intellectuals, it is true, find infinite innovations in it and are delighted—but they end up, at the end of as many verses as they can read, exactly as they were before reading them. As for those who are accustomed to great art, it is impossible for them to endure more than a few pages of these frivolities that only distract from the one blatant truth: the mind that conceived them had nothing interesting to say.
In Literature, It Is Just as Useful to Vary the Style
In literature, it is just as useful to vary the style as it is in life to vary the thoughts. The risk of not doing so is to become addicted and diminished, narrowing horizons and dooming the next expression to be a replica of the previous one. To a certain extent, varying the style is also thinking differently, and the writer who gets used to doing this will be getting used to stimulating the brain so that it does not settle for what it has already conceived.