Tag: writing

Some writer once made the wise recommendation: one work at a time. And there is no doubt that concentrating the mind on a single piece of work can only speed it up, intensify it and be of great benefit to creation. But is it possible to stick to this rule? Perhaps with prose. With poetry, however, the situation changes, and when the planned verses exceed a few hundred, the mind seems to beg for an escape valve into which it can pour lines and lines and experience the relief of fluidity. Without this valve, soon the unproductivity, added to the ideas that accumulate in a closed deposit, begin to torture. For the poet, practicing prose seems psychologically essential.

It is characteristic of many authors that they express themselves with restraint, more by suggesting than by actually expressing what they want. In some cases, the suggestion certainly works, and perhaps says more than direct expression could. But this technique, if always employed, results in a vice that harms the author even more than the work. It is a vice that, whenever the verb is born inflamed in the mind, rejects its inflamed expression on paper. And so it is as if the author were forbidden certain ways of speaking. It is not just an obvious limitation, but the deprivation of extremely important artistic experiences: once the writer breaks all ties and forces his spirit to express what he wants with maximum intensity, he will realize that there, in the act of creation, something different has happened; but, above all, he will realize that, by concentrating entirely and sincerely on this, something different always happens.

The shock I suffered after first reading Crime and Punishment, probably the most decisive of my entire life, was largely due to the realization that what Dostoevsky did in Crime and Punishment was unlike anything I had ever witnessed, both in and out of literature, and to the realization of the immense nobility of this attempt. Doing something like that, I concluded, justifies and dignifies an existence. And what Dostoevsky and some other authors do is so different that today, more than a decade on from that first impression, I realize that time has done nothing but reinforce it. A book like Crime and Punishment will never emerge from the pen of someone who simply wants to tell a story. That is why it is so natural for me to read Joseph Frank’s lines revealing that, after a dramatic combination of circumstances, Dostoevsky wrote to his brother saying that, from that moment on, the aim of his life would be to study the meaning of life and man. Without this conscious resolution, he would never have been able to come close to what he did.

The desire to be read is only the lowest of the possible motivations for writing, and is often absent when one of the higher ones manifests itself. There is little room for it when one feels the invincible urge to preserve oneself by engraving one’s spirit in letters, transcending time and dignifying experience with a lasting record. The awareness of uniqueness gives rise to the desire to express it, to perhaps elevate oneself to it through the right expression, which denotes its understanding. When one thinks about these things, one realizes how far they are from the trivial desire to be heard or the need for attention.