More than anyone else, one might say. The taste for books seems to grow as intelligence grows, a bit lower down but on the same stalk, the way every passion is accompanied by a predilection for whatever surrounds the object of that passion, whatever is connected to it, whatever speaks of it in its absence. So too, the greatest writers, in the hours when they are not in direct communication with their thoughts, enjoy the company of books. Besides, is it not for them above all that the books were written?
Do the books not reveal to them a thousand beauties which remain hidden from the masses? But the fact that some superior minds are what we call bookish does not in the slightest prove that this bookishness is not a defect. One cannot conclude from the fact that second-rate men are often hard-working and intelligent men often lazy that work is not a better mental discipline than laziness.
Even so, to encounter one of our own flaws in a great man always makes us tempted to wonder if this flaw might not be at bottom an unrecognised virtue; it is not without pleasure that we learn that Victor Hugo knew Quintus-Curtius, Tacitus, and Justinian by heart, and that if anyone challenged him on the validity of a term he could trace its genealogy all the way back to its origins, citing quotations which demonstrated a true erudition.11 (I have shown elsewhere how this erudition could nourish his genius instead of stifling it, the way a bundle of sticks can put out a small fire but feed a large one.)
Maeterlinck, who for me is the opposite of a ‘literary man’ in this sense, whose spirit is constantly open to the thousand nameless emotions communicated by the beehive, the soil, or the grass, greatly reassures us about the dangers of erudition, of bibliophilia almost, when he describes for us as an amateur the engravings which adorn an old edition of Jacob Cats or Antonius Sanderus.
Furthermore, since the dangers of erudition, when they do exist, threaten the intelligence much less than they do the sensibility, thinkers have a much greater capacity for productive reading (if one may put it this way) than creative writers. Schopenhauer, for example, gives us the picture of a mind energetic enough to wear lightly the most enormous erudition; each new piece of knowledge is immediately reduced to its core of reality, to the living portion it contains.
Schopenhauer never offers an opinion without immediately supporting it with multiple quotations, but we can feel that for him the texts he cites are only examples, unconscious anticipatory allusions in which he is happy to recognise certain aspects of his own thought but which in no way inspired it.
I recall a passage of The World as Will and Representation where there are maybe twenty citations in a row. The topic is pessimism (and naturally I condense the quotations here): ‘Just as in Candide Voltaire in his facetious manner wages war on optimism, so has Byron done the same, in his tragic way, in Cain. Herodotus reports that the Thracians welcomed the newborn child with lamentation and rejoiced at every death.
This runs as follows in a fine verse preserved for us by Plutarch: ‘Lugere genitum, tanta qui intravit mala…’ It is to this that we must attribute the Mexican custom of wishing [etc.], and in pursuance of the same feeling, Swift (if the biography by Sir Walter Scott is to be believed) early adopted the custom of celebrating his day of birth as a day of sadness. Well known is the passage in Apology where Plato says that death is a wonderful gain.
A saying of Heraclitus shares the same conception: ‘Vitæ nomen quidem est vita, opus autem mors.’ The fine lines of Theognis are well known: ‘Optima sort homini non esse…’ Sophocles, in Oedipus at Colonnus (1224), gives the following abbreviation of this: ‘Natum non esse sortes vincit alias omnes…’ Euripides says: ‘Omnis hominum vita est plena dolore’ (Hippolytus 189), and Homer already said: ‘Non enim quidquam alicubi est calamitosius homine omnium, quotquot super terram spirant…’ Even Pliny says: ‘Nullum melius esse tempestiva morte.’ Shakespeare puts into the mouth of the old King Henry IV the words: ‘O, if this were seen – The happiest youth / Would shut the book and sit him down and die.’ Finally, Byron: ‘’Tis something better not to be.’
Balthasar Gracián also brings before our eyes the misery of our existence in the darkest colours in the Criticón, etc. etc.’12 If I had not already let myself run on far too long with Schopenhauer, I would have enjoyed completing this little demonstration with the aid of Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life, which is perhaps, of all the works I know, the one which presupposes in its author the greatest originality along with the widest reading, such that, at the start of the book, every page of which contains numerous quotations, Schopenhauer was right to have written in all seriousness: ‘Compilation is not my business.’
There is no doubt that friendship, friendship for individuals, is a frivolous thing, and reading is a friendship. But at least it is a sincere form of friendship, and the fact that it is directed at someone dead, someone absent, gives it something disinterested, almost touching. It is also a form of friendship unencumbered with everything that makes other friendships ugly.
Since we all, we the living, are nothing but the dead who have not yet taken up our offices, all the courtesies, all the greetings in the entrance-hall, that we call respect, gratitude, and devotion and into which we mix so many lies, are unproductive and exhausting.
Furthermore, from our first bonds of sympathy, admiration, and recognition, the first words we speak and the first letters we write weave around us the first threads of a web of habit, a veritable mode of existence which we can no longer extricate ourselves from in the ensuing friendships; not to mention that the excessive words we utter during this time remain, like promissory notes we have to pay, or else we will pay far more, for the rest of our lives, in self-reproach for having refused to honour them.
In reading, friendship is suddenly returned to its initial purity. With books there is no civility. If we spend the evening with these friends, it is because we truly want to. From them, at least, we often part only with reluctance. And with none of the thoughts, when we have left them, that spoil other friendships: What did they think of us? Were we impolite? Did they like us? And the fear of being forgotten for someone else.
All of these turmoils of friendship come to an end at the threshold of the pure and calm friendship of reading. No respectful deference either: we laugh at what Molière says only to the precise extent to which we find it funny; when he bores us we are not afraid to look bored; and when we have definitely had enough of him we put him back on the shelf as abruptly as if he were not a famous genius. The atmosphere of this pure form of friendship is a silence purer than words.
For we speak for others, but keep silent for ourselves. Silence, too, does not carry the trace of our flaws, our hypocrisies, as words do. It is pure, it is an atmosphere in the truest sense. It does not interpose between the author’s thought and our own the unavoidable obstacle, resistant to thought, of our different egos.
Even the language of the book is pure (in any book worthy of the name), rendered transparent by the author’s thought which has removed from the book everything that is not itself until the book becomes its faithful portrait; every sentence, fundamentally, is like every other, because they have all been spoken with the unique inflection of a single personality; there is thus a kind of continuity, incompatible with the interactions we have in life and with everything foreign to thought that those interactions mix into it, a continuity which instantly enables us to follow the true line of the author’s thought, the features of his physiognomy, as reflected in this tranquil mirror.
We can delight in one feature after another of each of these authors without needing them to be worthy, because it is a great spiritual pleasure to discern these profound depictions and to love them, in a friendship without ego, without fine phrases, as if inside ourselves. Someone like Gautier, for example, pleases us as an ordinary good fellow with excellent taste (it is amusing to think that anyone could consider him a representative of artistic perfection).
We do not exaggerate his spiritual capacities; in his A Romantic in Spain, where every sentence, when he least suspects it, accentuates and extends this line full of the grace and cheerfulness of his personality (the words fall into place of their own accord to trace it, because it is his personality that chose and arranged them), we cannot help but consider far removed from true art the compulsion he seems to feel not to let a single form or shape go by without describing it in its entirety, and adding a comparison that, because it is not born of a strong and pleasing impression, does not charm us in the least.
We can only blame the pitiful aridity of his imagination when he compares the landscape with its various crops to ‘those tailors’ cards on which are stuck patterns
