Tag: literature

When the style is imposing and pleasing, a passage that does not say anything important can be tolerated. In some cases, one can tolerate more, much more than a single passage, depending on the quality of the author. It is interesting to observe this because it is proof that aesthetic pleasure alone can sustain interest. So metrical poetry, aesthetically and grammatically well constructed, has an obvious advantage and can, by its technique alone, please us. There are many verses which do not have much beyond that, and yet it seems sufficient to us and such verses seem good to us. The same is true of prose, and there are not infrequent examples where we might say that, in short, the style is the author.

Perhaps the importance of that mysterious something, that unsaid something recommended by Poe and so often used in literature, is more illusory than real. That is to say: it does not matter whether the message of a work is presented directly or obliquely, what matters is how much it impacts and how much it is able to make one think. It is true that, when a work ends by leaving the conclusion under a shadow, it seems that the author is urging us to sketch it out for ourselves. It is also common for us to have the feeling that such an ending contains something profound, even if it is only an impression. However, there are works whose message impacts us with such violence that it entrenches itself in us never to leave us again—and these would often lose their force if they did not say what they say in a way that is impossible for us to misinterpret.

There is no maturity or experience capable of eliminating the poignant frustration when we come across an error—exactly that, an error—in a literary work already written and already revised by us. What to say? Something seems certain: they are there, and will always be there. It is a truly indescribable feeling to find, there, the irrefutable proof of carelessness, and then to feel your hand scratching like Kafka’s to light a big fire and throw the botched work there. It does not matter how much time passes, nor how much is learned: it is not possible to overcome, neither the error, nor the frustration.

The most challenging exercise in concentration and patience is undoubtedly writing surrounded by noise. Chaining reasoning with the mind invaded by outside noises is like placing a sound recorder in the middle of a battlefield and, wielding a violin, assigning oneself the mission of recording a complete song. There are, it is true, noises and noises. None of them seems to overcome the power of the human voice, in its infinite manifestations. The words, in the brain that reasons, seem to invade it and interpose themselves in the space that separates the words from the sentence project, making any solid logical formation impossible, requiring the effort to start over and over again. In short, it is an exercise with a result that is almost always useless; except for the fact that he who practices it regularly is unlikely to be irritated on other occasions.