There are moments when I suddenly realise how far I have moved from my "salad-days"-belief in the power of literature to change and save the world, or some other grandiloquent design.All in all, I belief in the power of literature to save myself, to preserve a sanctuary of sanity, lucidity, freedom, away from the senseless chitter-chatter outside, away from the shallowness of most people you are forced to put up with on a daily basis. A space I cherish more and more as time goes by and there is less and less time for this precious shelter that makes no demands on life - only on emotion and the imagination. A place where you can "goldenly stagnate in the sun, like a murky pond surrounded by flowers, lost among larger things", as Pessoa put it.
Call it escapism, cowardice, daydreaming, whatever. To me it has always been life-sustaining (more literally than you can think). And it will remain so. Always.
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To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarate, and the performing arts (such as acting and dancing) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning it into a slumber. The other arts make no such retreat - some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself.
This isn't the case with literature. Literature simulates life. A novel is a story that never was, and a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expressionn of ideas or feelings in a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.
. . .
All literature is an attempt to make life real. As all of us know, even when we don't act on what we know, life is absolutely unreal in its directly real form; the country, the city and our ideas are all absolutely fictitious things, the offspring of our complex sensation of our own selves. Impressions are incommunicable unless we make them literary.
Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel and not what someone has taught them to feel. Once I heard a child, who wished to say he was on the verge of tears, say not 'I feel like crying,' which is what an adult, i.e. an idiot, would say, but rather, 'I feel like tears.' And this phrase - so literary it would seem affected in a well-known poet, if he could ever invent it - decisively refers to the warm presence of tears about to burst from eyelids that feel the liquid bitterness. . . .
To say! To know what to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming - like worms when a rock is lifted - under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.
This isn't the case with literature. Literature simulates life. A novel is a story that never was, and a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expressionn of ideas or feelings in a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.
. . .
All literature is an attempt to make life real. As all of us know, even when we don't act on what we know, life is absolutely unreal in its directly real form; the country, the city and our ideas are all absolutely fictitious things, the offspring of our complex sensation of our own selves. Impressions are incommunicable unless we make them literary.
Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel and not what someone has taught them to feel. Once I heard a child, who wished to say he was on the verge of tears, say not 'I feel like crying,' which is what an adult, i.e. an idiot, would say, but rather, 'I feel like tears.' And this phrase - so literary it would seem affected in a well-known poet, if he could ever invent it - decisively refers to the warm presence of tears about to burst from eyelids that feel the liquid bitterness. . . .
To say! To know what to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming - like worms when a rock is lifted - under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, ed. and trans. by Richard Zenith (Penguin, 2002), pp. 107-08.
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Indeed: "to be no more, have no more, want no more"... - neither happy nor sad, without burden or destination...
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