Tag: literature

By Pío Baroja:

Los pintores —añadió Larrañaga con aire agresivo— serían los menos inteligentes de los artistas si no existieran los escultores, los músicos y los cómicos, que son la quintaesencia de lo cerril. La mayoría de ellos son unos patanes llenos de suficiencia. Nada tan aburrido como un artista. Es más ameno hablar con la portera o con un tendero de comestibles. El pintor y el bohemio, como tipos amenos, ingeniosos y espirituales, son falsificaciones de nuestra época.

There is no denying it: bohemianism has given the world half a dozen geniuses and, for every one of them, the world has produced a good few thousand imbeciles. These circles, everyone knows, are always made up of would-be artists, and sporadically welcome one or two worthy of the name. But as naturally as they visit out of curiosity, they soon leave out of disappointment. A waste of time, sterility and presumption. In these circles, art is nothing more than a pretext, just like soccer, other people’s lives or politics. The bohemian artist is a falsification.

A lot of interesting things can be learned from these modern linguistic studies, on which much of today’s philosophy is based. The problem is that, after a few dozen pages we feel strangely like we’re sailing far, far away from reality, already at a point where we cannot establish any connection with it. And so, if we take on board the argument under consideration, we get ourselves into an awful mess. The mistake is all too obvious: these authors, consciously or not, have swapped experience for language, as if the two were interchangeable, as if the former were dispensable. It is a simple mistake, but once it is made, it is very difficult to get around.

Above all, this criticism that cannot analyze a verse without associating it with a “movement” is sterile, as if the author, when composing it, was only thinking of adapting it to a “current”, of supporting it with a pile of buzzwords that distinguish a “ lineage”. How many great poets have done this? Is symptomatic this refusal to see the individual, or rather, this insistence on wanting to see an artificial collective mentality, in most cases not only non-existent, but impossible. Sometimes, to avoid such ridicule, it seems that it would be best never to resort to such classifications…

In the West, the gradual easing of access to books has not been accompanied by a gradual increase in the understanding of reality. Quite the opposite: in recent decades, when access has become monstrously easy, there also seems to have been a monstrous increase in the mental confusion in which the West finds itself. The irony of all this is the return of very old problems that seemed long since pacified—problems that, theoretically, a little study could solve. For some reason, it seems that inaccessibility aroused curiosity, which in turn encouraged reading and the desire to understand. There is no denying it: man is inclined to judge the most accessible as less interesting—unfortunately.