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.
Tag: literature
The Most Challenging Exercise
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.
The Merit of Detaching…
The merit of detaching oneself from the present seems to lie precisely in the difficulty of doing so. A life dedicated to the future or, in other words, a life centered on what remains—this is the ideal scenario. It so happens that, against one’s will, the present is always interfering, and one might wonder if literature does not depend on this shock, which ends up exposing the problem of impermanence. That is to say: beyond the expressive need, literature is born out of a need for preservation. The further he moves away from both, the more the artist will deteriorate. And so, even if one can idealize a scenario where efforts converge entirely on the enduring, it seems somehow necessary for the present to repeatedly remind one of its reason.
Would Go to Jail
It is impressive to note how easily writers of the last two centuries would go to jail if they published today what they published a few decades ago. They would be fiercely persecuted, fiercely censored, and, unless saved by a very rare confluence of factors, would be prevented from writing and publishing. Dead, however, with a few exceptions, they remain tolerated, if not ignored. This highlights both the hysterical and authoritarian character of this century, and it has become more than ever preferable to remain anonymous.