Alexandru Paleologu--Why do I write? What do I believe in?

I just found this book by Alexandru Paleologu, Despre lucrurile cu adevarat importante (On the really important things) and the preface is the author's answer to a questionnaire which asks--well, you see for yourself. I did a quick and dirty translation (don't shoot me!) and didn't include the original because it was already getting way too long. I found myself nodding vigorously through some passages (like, the intrinsic value of art and writing), and saying "Huh" and "Hm" through others, like the last paragraph about the intrinsic evil of stupidity, or perhaps viceversa, which raised more problems than it solved, and it's in my opinion absolutely untenable.

But! I'm too tired to talk about it now! Tomorrow perhaps, gentle readers (yes, you two in the back, playing Scrabble. I can see you!)--tomorrow, perhaps, I'll have more stamina to disagree with this intellectual giant. Until then, enjoy!

_________________________________________________________________

Why do I write? What do I believe in?
Alexandru Paleologu

Why do I write? I’ve asked myself that question many times. I can quote this sentence by Eugene Ionesco: Pourquoi j’écris ? Je suis encore à me le demander. Yes. Besides the fact that I cannot do otherwise, what can I answer? Although that’s not completely true. I’ve spent whole years without writing anything. Every year, weeks and sometimes months pass without my writing a single word. That doesn’t mean I don’t work, that I don’t create. There are some who plan their writing, a certain (fixed) number of hours per day and a certain number of pages, more or less, irrespective of the quality of the text and irrespective of whether the text will be preserved/kept or not; genie ou non, as Stendhal would say. I think these people are graphomaniacs. Graphomania doesn’t exclude genius, only pretentiousness does. Baudelaire or maybe someone else, I can’t remember, said: qui ne TRAVAILLE pas tous les jours, ne travaille jamais, and not qui n’ECRIT pas tous les jours (underlining mine). Sadoveanu, who, as everybody knows, wrote a lot, confessed in an interview to Ion Biberi in 1945 that he only really writes, in fact, for about three months a year.

It’s rather rude to talk about me now, after all the names I just mentioned, but the question compels me to. I start writing when what has been accumulating for a long time calls me implacably to express it. I cannot write anything without a long gestation, which is largely subconscious. Very often, most of the time in fact, while I’m busy with something else, or with nothing (busy with nothing), or engaged in conversation, lapidary formulations cross mind, expressions of thoughts that seem to me to be worthy of remembering, but, as I’m counting on my memory, I’m not writing them down (it’s usually not even possible at the moment) and I forget them. I don’t regret them. I find it highly presumptuous, this avarice, this drive to not lose any of one’s own thoughts, to hoard them. It’s normal to lose about 80 percent of them. Spiritual life consists largely of such losses, and the achievements are just the rest. Most of the times, a page can be just the residue, the remainder of entire years of reverie, reflections, accumulations. The moment things become unbearable and demand the material action of putting them on paper, or when an accident, usually one that seems minor, but is decisive in this complicated process, triggers this act, only and only then the true transmutation takes place, or, to use an improper but accredited term, “creation.” Thoughts only matter when they are expressed, which is, when they become text. This transmutation is the gift I-don’t-know-who gives you, but only then labor starts, which for me is usually a painful process, when I lose track of meals or of normal sleeping time, I sleep when I can, for one or two hours on the couch in my study, I eat when I can, whether writing flows seamlessly, or, as it’s most often the case, whether I have to rewrite the same page God knows how many times. Sometimes I start to despair; it’s pure hell. But in the end some kind of exaltation takes place, an exultation comparable with erotic triumphs, repaying with hefty interest all the pangs, exasperations, and losses of self esteem. Who made me, who cursed me to write? What’s the point? All these vituperations are then forgotten, or linger in memory like ridiculous yammers, like the whims of an old coquette.

The eventual success of the written piece pleases me, of course, it’s only human, after all, but it ranks much lower compared to the delight of the act itself and the feeling, perhaps illusory, that you get out of your accomplishment in your craft. I cannot know for sure whether what I write deserves to be remembered (to be honest, I think so), nor can I know whether, deserving or not, it has any chance to. There is authorial vanity. I said it on another occasion why in my case, for deeply personal reasons, this vanity is reduced to a minimum. But it does exist, there’s nothing I can do about it, and I’m not even too ashamed to admit it.

But there, I’ve covered how I write, but not why. I don’t know how to answer that question. Some may write with a purpose in mind, for example, to reform mores, society, educate the nation, a.s.o. Among these, some are actually writers, despite that goal. For others, many, even, writing means money or glory, but still, they’re a secondary incentive. The essential finality of literature, of art in general, which includes, willy-nilly, literary criticism, essays, philosophy, even great oratory, whose objective is usually persuasion with a view to accomplishing an immediate practical goal, is ultimately a purposeless finality, that is, one that implies knowledge, contemplation, and apprehending the truth. Which is to say, beauty (which will save the world). This is even more evident in the case of oratory, for its practical interest is the fastest to expire, but its aesthetic interest survives centuries or even millennia.

Fate, over which I have no control, made it so that the genre I write is the essay, a term which I’ve come to abhor, because for a while now it’s been subjected to a totally devaluing inflation process. Before you can count to three, there it is—essay, essayistic. It’s come to mean (and excuse/absolve) incompetence and pseudo-elegance. As a matter of fact, the essay claims total competence in the most ignored of fields, of being human (a field in which anthropology is rarely competent, and even then, very little). The word “essay,” popularized, of course, by Montaigne, expresses an (ironic!) prudent modesty, understood, as I said on other occasions, as technical rather than moral virtue, and it also means the need to test realities, to try them, to subject experience and thought to a process of check and balances, to testify about the human trials and tribulations.

What do I believe in?

I could simply answer, in God, a term you can interpret as you like (energy, matter, spirit, force, natura naturans…) But I prefer to affirm the traditional Credo, without circumlocutions. I therefore believe also in the reality of the Cunning one, which is to say, I notice the cunningness of stupidity and the stupidity of cunningness. For that’s what the Devil is: Stupidity. He is not, as people tend to believe, smart, subtle, ironic, Mephistophelean, etc. No. He’s stupid. “Diabolical intelligence”: this phrase is stupid, it’s nonsensical. Only stupidity is diabolic (meanness and Evil are its side effects). Stupidity and Evil are transcendental realities, of numinous character, are something ungeheuer, as Rudolf Otto would say. Look (there are countless opportunities to do so) how cunning the imbeciles can be, what kind of tricks they have up their sleeves, that intelligence can’t really construe, not because it’s incapable of it, but because it doesn’t waste its time with the stupid purposes of tricks (tricks only have stupid purposes, and of course, evil, and destructive). Stupidity is eternal and invincible; it’s a hydra with countless heads which sprout back every time you cut them, which is why they need to be cut again and again with the acids of intelligence, to keep it in check; it’s all one can do against it. Have you noticed that every time one talks about stupidity, in the most general sense of the word, a lot of people get upset? It’s wrong to believe that the stupid don’t realize they are stupid. They know very well they are and they have an infallible instinct to detect intelligence and mobilize against it, spontaneously and organically, systematically and savagely. That’s why we have, manifested either directly or dissimulated, but always tenacious, so much hostility towards Caragiale, the abyssal Caragiale, the genius of radical intelligence, the most efficient of the great Romanians at unmasking Stupidity. There are too many stupid people in the world, but luckily there are also lots of Romanians who’d rather take a smart man in loss than a stupid man in gain! The stupid, in the moonlight or under the lamps of meeting rooms, are horrified of laughter. They must know why.