Tag: writing

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.

It is necessary to write regularly so that the habit automatizes the reaffirmation of the vow and the spirit does not succumb to the very dangerous lapses in which literature seems insufficient and motivation vanishes before the affliction of writing or, rather, before the affliction of existing. The writer cannot allow the limitations of life to convey the illusion that literature is also limited. He must see in literature precisely what life lacks; therefore, transforming occupation not only into a refuge, but into a solution to the problem of existing.

All this affliction experienced by the serious writer could be mitigated if it were possible for him to promise and deceive himself, with each new work, that after completing it he would stop writing. Therefore, to see the present work as the last, always. Thus, the illusion of later relief would give strength so that the very painful work of the moment would not afflict, but rather motivate, because it is the last of a spirit that is one step away from rest. Unfortunately, this is not possible. What is possible is to see in dismay how much one still has to do, is to feel imprisoned by duty, obliged to force lines that refuse to come out, and then to fry oneself in a terrible process in which the satisfaction is strange and the result is always the same affliction.

If it is necessary for the writer to establish a link with his time, he can only do so by living it. It is inevitable… no matter how hard one tries, one cannot feel a past or future time as those who have lived or will live in it have felt and will feel it. Therefore, one can only have a notion of a distant time, and a notion entirely dependent on the degree to which the writer felt it in the flesh to then describe it to us. In this way, living his own time can be seen by the writer as a mission for the benefit of those who have not yet been born, and therefore it is perfectly possible, and even necessary, for him to find meaning in that which seems unpleasant and importunate: only in this way can he be useful and indispensable to those who will come.