With the fallen zenith of the Summer sun, my reverence in front of books and great minds disappears. I realize that infinite questions, fruitless search for the meaning of life paralyze man, make him impotent to any action, and by keeping philosophers in high regard he demolishes his own greatness. Why did no one tell me that, I ask, the purpose of life was to act?
We read, but what we read isn’t merely the writing of an author anymore. We read, passing text through our capacity of understanding, vocabulary, tiredness, emotions, experiences, temperament — ourselves. We are, additionally, incapable of or unwilling to understand the intelligence, vocabulary, experience, temperament of the author, as well as the full historical and geographical context of the published writing. Hence, every reading is a misinterpretation of the text.
Books are for the refinement of our experiences and should prepare us for life—action. In books, we cannot find answers to the most important questions of life, for no one knows the answer. Famous writers are no more than talented showmen who have mastered their craft — the craft of word, structure of language, lyrical flow of sentences, rhythm of syllables, consonants, vowels. The main purpose of literature is to entertain, soothe us, or rush the blood in our veins. We find solace in the novels of Balzac or Stendhal with the hope of understanding the “springs of society” (as Maurois would put it), or living an elevated, passionate life. We desperately hope that their stories will finally disillusion us, when in reality, because of our erroneous reckoning, they do the opposite and impose on us an unrealistic view of the world. One should realize: the eighteenth century French morals, confined by the experience, imagination, and complexity of its author’s character are nothing but distortion of reality. Nabokov didn’t have false expectations of literature:
1 We turn to the storyteller for entertainment, for mental stimulation of the simplest kind, for emotional involvement, for the pleasure of wandering in some distant regions of space and time. A slightly different, though not necessarily higher, cast of mind seeks teachers in writers. […] Unfortunately, I know people who read French and Russian novelists in order to find out something about life in gay Paris or in sad Russia.
Knowledge propagates through time, and authors I read have already studied classics in great depth. Not only studied, but purified. Not only purified, but opposed. Not only opposed, but rejected. Does it make someone a better man if he has studied the complete oeuvre of Plutarch or Seneca? Isn’t it obvious that in Montaigne I can find both the refined Plutarch and Seneca? Or that the whole knowledge corpus of humanity sums up to fifty ideas, being told and retold, over and over and over again in different forms and mediums?
I read Emerson half a year ago, and then shielded myself from the damages of self-reliance with Emerson Re-Read; yet I no longer am astonished by Alexander’s estrangement from, or even hostility towards Aristotle when I leaf through Plutarch. Character completes its first arc when it kills its idols, naturally, not forcefully. A young man feels a need to be noticed by accomplished men of experience and respect when he sees them, but if he is intelligent and not stagnant, he soon can’t help but comprehend his own true worth, and the true worth of others. Together with illusions, he loses his sense of distance in relation to greatness.
Friends we admire are full of shortcomings, great minds we venerate are as troubled and lost as we are. Pascal was certainly a man of high intelligence, a great mathematician who wrote religious notes for himself. But going through his life, we notice his weak health, his “manic depression and almost infantile dependence on his family in his mature years”, that “Pascal was never employed in any capacity”, and his religious writings “were published posthumously by partisan proponents of Jansenism”.2
We approach a scholar, an eternal student of philosophy, with the hope of gaining wisdom, and to our surprise, we soon realize that he is as miserable as we are. He has neither answers nor sagacity and, like a parrot, he repeats the ideas of influential men who have lived centuries before him and contradicted each other. Wisdom comes from not theory, but experience, from not education, but action. I know the true story of an illiterate and poor peasant who, for his family, exacted his revenge on a wicked yet powerful official.
3 One thing is certain today — the illiterate are definitely not the least intelligent among us. If it be knowledge or wisdom one is seeking, then one had better go direct to the source. And the source is not the scholar or philosopher, not the master, saint, or teacher, but life itself — direct experience of life.
An ill-mind seeks answers, wanders, casts round for the source as if the source is not under his nose. His mind is chastised by infinite questions of ‘how’s: “How to get the direct experience of life”?, “How to live life at its full intensity?”, “How to live with passion?” He looks for an external remedy as if the remedy is outside, and he turns to limitless books and countless works of art, only to be disenchanted. But at the end of painful disenchantment, there is a glimmer of hope, and the coda of oblivious idolatry may eventually bring a cure.
We naively assume that the solution is out there, at hand’s reach, and with each new source of knowledge, we get closer to the truth. But the truth is infinitely far away, and we, like Pascal, should notice that zero, one million, and negative one million are all at an equal distance from infinity. Looking inward, in the end, is as vain in our search for the meaning. Learning to live begins when we shut our eyes to the questions of life that bother us. And if shutting is impossible, we have no other choice but to make ourselves blind. Ignorance is the ferry of life crossing the bridge of doubt.
You propose I should either improve myself in every direction or gain mastery in a single area. I retort: For what? For the satisfaction on my deathbed that I used to be a healthy and esteemed man with great skills in playing the violin? Then you coax me into selflessly dedicating my life to other people, aiding them, teaching them, guiding them. Don’t you know that self-sacrifice is a selfish act when it is the only way to justify your existence? How can I teach when I know nothing? It is me who is lost and needs help, I crave guidance. Finally, you entice me with the idea that I should work on my character, whip my will, detach myself from my desires and affections in pursuit of enlightenment — to transcend the average man. I oppose! In the base of my affections slumbers my character, and in chopping the trail for my desires begins the wisdom of my life.
If every single day, with every new dawn, I wished for the exact same wish with the exact same force, if I could aim my thoughts at the exact same target with the exact same precision, if the pressure of my will was consistent at every point, and at every moment I could command the vigor of my passions, then my numbness, this lethargy of mine would finally disappear, then I would have no wish left unfulfilled. I would finally see myself in the mirror and realize that I am more than a non-human.
Only one goal is needed for any given moment. More than one goal hampers a man, confuses his mind, and distracts him from his final destination. Akin to a satellite that rotates about only one planet, so my every thought and desire must consistently revolve around the same goal. I must wake up every morning to this main purpose, I have to earnestly strive for the same objective, all my habits must spring from this fervent motive. Constancy and resoluteness — these should become quoins defining my essence. But all my desires are half-desires, and therefore I myself am a half-man.
What a man would become if he didn’t fear death and was indifferent to the admiration of others? He would be much more than he is, he would finally become himself, and his decisions wouldn’t be limited by ugly constraints. He would heal from the malady of commonness and express his essence both verbally and physically. He wouldn’t slowly kill his capacity to live by carefully hiding from others the fact that he is actually weaker than how he seems. For his decision, he would be both punished and rewarded at the extremes.
It is impossible to navigate inside the web of lies that protects us from the slanders and gossip of crooked natures. These walls we build around isolate us from beautiful souls to the same degree as they preserve us from damage. It takes time until we find the right balance between revealing ourselves and hiding what is truly personal, but to consistently live behind a mask of ideal while anxiously trying to hold the phantasm of our public image intact is very tiring and not effective; our mask is fragile and is shattered by our first laxness.
When we hide ourselves, we conceal our flaws, when we express our shortcomings, we hope to gain the approval of others by carefully choosing what to declare. A man is always in the midst of the battle between his untamed desires and the iron bars of society. Progressing through life, he either submits himself to the cage of societal norms, is marginalized and cast out by society for his nonconformism or abnormality, or manages to become the master of both his desires and society.
We have a tendency to mix the temperament of others with our own, and use the pronoun “we” instead of “I”. I realize that the essay which only had to reject books and idols turned into a naive defense of following desires as a way of living. A sophisticated reader would immediately understand that I hoped to not show a path, but to find a path, and not for everyone, but for myself. Over time, I have developed an obscure understanding of how to properly live, but I should be the last person to approach for advice on living. I chase the admiration of others, I am dependent on societal norms, I follow predefined patterns.
Just by glimpsing around, I can find a dozen easygoing hedonists who seem to avidly relish life. At first, it appears to be that they know how to live, but that all is a mirage. I can learn from them the importance of celebration and play, but for everything else, they are as bored as I am, and more spoiled than me. Their desires are common, naive, unrefined, they have never questioned their existence, and their way of living was introduced to them as the only option from the beginning. They opened their eyes, they saw fake hedonists around them, and they became fake hedonists themselves. What is a true hedonist? I imagine a true hedonist to be someone who has arrived at the exact same conclusion, but gradually and painfully. He comprehends the shortness of life and the importance of good moments, he tries to live his days as his last, and he is probably a war veteran, who, at some point, has looked at Death in the eye.
I left this essay alone for several days to come back and look at it with a fresh head. I had time to discuss the current state of my mind with others. It’s apparent that when a man rushes to the extreme, completely undermines the intellectual authority of great minds, and equalizes his worth with the worth of truly accomplished men, he loses the reference point to strive towards. He is nobody, yet he assumes that he is somebody. He did nothing, yet he believes that he is enough.
There is nothing in my writing that I am certain about, yet my sentences claim confidence. I am afraid of misleading someone to my perplexed understanding of reality, but I shouldn’t assume more self-importance than I deserve, and the impact I can have. I have already installed wiring around the hazardous void of my thoughts, and what I write is nothing but a checkpoint to describe my intellectual capacity in some region of time and space.
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ 4
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
I draft the following lines: In a man dozes a seed of greatness and he has no interest in breaking his gramophone of lullabies. This gramophone is made up of books and idols. With these sentences, I become certain that this essay is only a literary exercise for me. There is nothing original in it, it is a copy of Emerson and others who condensed a proportion of existing knowledge of their time. Everything I say, and everything I am going to say, has been said before, more clearly, precisely, beautifully. There is nothing new under the sun. A wider look should also tell to the reader that this writing is a result of books I have read.
Footnotes
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Lectures on Literature, Vladimir Nabokov (1980) ↩
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Blaise Pascal, Desmond Clarke, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) ↩
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The Books in My Life, Henry Miller (1952) ↩
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Rubáiyát, Omar Khayyam (translated by Edward FitzGerald) ↩