Future Ghost Story

I have grown, for the most part, by means of leisure.

just witnessed something devastating

What is characteristic of great geniuses is their faculty of generalizing and their power of creation. They create types, each of which epitomizes a class, and by doing so they enrich the consciousness of mankind. Don’t we believe that Don Quixote is as real as Caesar? Shakespeare is formidable in this regard. He was not a man, he was a continent; he contained whole crowds of great men, entire landscapes. Writers like him do not worry about style: they are powerful in spite of all their faults and because of them. When it comes to us, the little men, our value depends on finished execution. Hugo, in this century, will rout all his contemporaries, even though he is full of bad things: but what lung-power! What inspiration! I will risk a proposition here that I wouldn’t dare utter to anyone else: that very great men often write very badly—and bravo for them. To discover the art of form, one should go not to them but to writers of the second class (Horace, La Bruyère). It is essential to memorize the masters, idolize them, try to think like them, and then put them aside once and for all. To learn technique, it is more profitable to go to the erudite, the skillful. Adieu—I have been constantly interrupted while writing the above—it must lack common sense . . .