Arquivo de literature | Page 96 of 111

Intellectual Formation Requirements

Intellectual formation fundamentally requires two tasks: to study the great authors and to study authors with radically conflicting world views. In the beginning, the obvious: it is a matter of respect for one’s own intelligence to toast with the great ones. The classics must be read, studied, absorbed, and integrated into the personality of the intellectual. Then, with the base set, it is possible to aim for evolution. The next step is to transform the mind into a violent battlefield. The intellectual necessarily needs the conflict, the clash of ideas: only in this way is it possible to progress. To read conflicting authors is to understand the complexity of life, the variations in the mechanisms of perception, to recognize and accept the ambiguous. Moreover, talk to different minds, if sincerely, not only widens knowledge but also imposes humility, but opens up merits where people say they do not exist, in short, it magnifies. This is why it is necessary to deal with opposites, to abandon prejudices, to free oneself from the chains of thought. The opposite path is to repeat what is convenient, deny contradictions, and never evolve. To let ideas burst freely is to let them, by force, drag the mind to the intelligence.

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Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov is an author who shakes me like few others. His Lectures on Russian Literature have given me a very strong and ambiguous impression. Then, interviews, like that of the Paris Review, consolidated the image I have in mind of him: a giant, but of an arrogance that escapes my understanding. And I simply do not understand some stones thrown by Nabokov, as in Dostoevsky in particular: I remain on the wall judging them envious or expressing intellectual honesty. Whatever: my mind suffers from this unbearable need for judgment; I do not. For I open Lolita and, repeating what I said a few days ago: one page is enough to perceive myself before a great writer, one page is enough to impress me with wonderful, elegant prose, brilliant in style and powerful in content. Nabokov’s prose, in Lolita, is endowed with the body that the English language seems to lack. And that is not the only reason why the work shines: Nabokov teaches the pairs of his century that writing about moral corruption does not demand the corruption of the language. Lolita digs deep: these are frightening pages about the psychology of a pedophile, ambiguous from the beginning, either by the controversial moralism, or by the behavior of Humbert Humbert, the protagonist, who oscillates between sarcasm, love, dissimulation, and desire, terribly corrupting a young girl and installing in our heads the infamous doubt: has he really corrupted? The mere questioning is the confession of immorality that inhabits our minds. And the masterpiece is the full proof that in man the hideous mixes with the sublime.

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A Confession, by Leo Tolstoy

Funny how a single page is enough to see oneself before a great soul. What is the difference between the great writer to the average writer? Leaving aside aesthetics, the great writer addresses the great questions of life. And Tolstoy, in this essay called A Confession, shows why he is among the greatest writers of all times: he recognizes and faces the greatest human problems. Why live, if life is about destroying everything that exists? Why make any effort if the end is invariably nothing? How can not consider life as the supreme evil, since it always leads to sickness and mortification? Is there anything that death does not destroy? How to accept fate, or rather: how to interpret it? These and other questions fill the few pages of this magnificent work, like everything I have come into contact with from the pen of this genius. One page, I repeat, one page of Tolstoy is enough to understand that great literature will never be about only telling a good story—that also does the shallow literature. Great literature is thirsty for a reply to the tormenting question: Why?

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Reality and Dream

I incline to think that human contentment springs from the encounter between reality and dream. I say and think immediately of D. Quijote. There is a winding border, apparently very ill-defined, that unites the real with the imaginary and seems to be the progenitor of satisfaction. The dream itself seems to me to be powerless if it lacks a connection with the concrete. A bridge is needed, a link, albeit in the form of hope, of “it will happen”. Otherwise, the practical quickly crushes the imagined, generating discouragement and shame. This, of course, in healthy minds. On the other hand, reality will always be weak because it is insufficient: it also needs an amplifier, something to embellish and tone up the crudeness of the concrete. And this, even in a subtle way, is nothing but fantasizing the real. That is why I am intrigued to what extent D. Quijote did not live what he dreamed of, or to what extent he actually lived. Crazy or master? I lack the answer…

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