It is true that, in addressing any topic, the writer can make it interesting by giving it depth or, rather, by showing himself as an expert on the subject. However, there is a limit which, if crossed, makes the text dull to an unbearable level. Technicism, in literature, is only to be tolerated when it reinforces the peculiarity of the expression that is independent of it; more often than not, what it does is to make the lines insipid for those unfamiliar with the area being dealt with. Unfortunately, this is a difficult mistake to avoid for someone who has dedicated himself to a certain subject and then decides to dramatize it. But it is good to keep in mind that great literature is not produced for specialists because, after all, we hardly call a specialist one who is one in the essential.
Tag: literature
It Is Strange to Note the Absolute Irrationality…
It is strange to note the absolute irrationality of this duty that is often the inexhaustible and most potent fuel in the trajectory of great writers. When asked about the reason for so much effort and so much affliction, the answer of “I have to do it” does not seem sufficient, and even believable. An entire life, then, justified by something inexplicable… this is, no doubt, something apparently fragile; and yet, so it is.
Dedicating to Shoes
The advantage of the intellectual who, like Boehme, devotes himself to shoes during the day is that he can write what he wants, when he wants and how he wants, also read what he wants for as long as he wants, and publish what he has written only if he wants. In short: freedom. No need to get involved in polemics, to please or submit to editors and other writers, no need to deal with reader-clients, no nothing. There are shoes that will always serve as intellectual deliverance. There is nothing to pay for that self-sufficiency and carefree feeling. Freedom, after all, is always dignity.
Fun and Luck
It is fun to imagine Fernando Pessoa picking up a napkin in a bar, scribbling a few lines in an almost illegible scribble, and throwing it, laughing, into his big trunk. And to spend his life laughing as he repeats the same scene over and over again, imagining the monstrous work he was delegating to men he has never even met. So leave a gigantic and disorganized paperwork, and to hell with the editors! It is certainly fun and tempting. However, Pessoa, who admirably turned disorganization into a method, was lucky, first, to find editors, and second, to find them competent. Anyone daring to follow his example must therefore have a lot of faith, as well as develop that enviable ability to confront a mess by accepting it as what one has devoted one’s life to producing.