The Unread

I had always supposed, dear friend, that loving your province as you do, you were resolved upon the practice, there, of detachment, scorn, silence. Imagine, then, my surprise on hearing you say you were preparing a book about it! Instantaneously, I saw looming up within you a future monster: the author you will become. “Another one lost,” I thought. Modestly, you refrained from asking the reasons for my disappointment; and I should have been incapable of giving them viva voce. “Another one lost, another one ruined by his talent,” I kept murmuring to myself.

Penetrating the literary inferno, you will come to learn its artifices and its arsenic; shielded from the immediate, that caricature of yourself, you will no longer have any but formal experiences, indirect experiences; you will vanish into the Word. Books will be the sole object of your discussions. As for literary people, you will derive no benefit from them. But you will find this out too late, after having wasted your best years in a milieu without density or substance. The literary man? An indiscreet man, who devalues his miseries, divulges them, tells them like so many beads: immodesty – the side-show of second-thoughts – is his rule; he offers himself. Every form of talent involves a certain shamelessness.