There Is an Insurmountable Distance…

There is an insurmountable distance between the misanthrope and his time that reveals itself with each attempt to approach it. The misanthrope who opens a contemporary novel will hardly be able to finish it, since he will gradually be overcome by a feeling of repulsion that will force him to throw it away, if he does not want to submit himself to a torture from which he has nothing to gain. Whose fault is this? Certainly not the novelist’s, who more often than not is only fulfilling part of his obligation to the future by describing minutiae and particularities. But there is no solution! His work, at every step, at every scene, will arouse bad feelings that will eventually suffocate the unadapted animal, and he will have to abandon it, if possible forget it. The misanthrope is someone out of place in space and time.