“The best
writers contain within their souls all the characters they will ever create on
the page; and those characters have always been there, throughout history; so
the writer, no matter how modern he thinks he is, deals always and only in eternity.”
No doubt “soul”
and “eternity” will trouble some readers, but I don’t think the crackpot notion
of “collective unconscious” can be substituted for the first nor can “time
immemorial” replace the second. I’ve read Don
Quixote only once, and that was forty-seven years ago. I was bored but no
longer trust all of my youthful reactions, positive or negative. After all, I
even liked Steinbeck when very young. I keep a mental list of titles to read a
second time because I can no longer depend on my first encounter. Cervantes
tops it, and I bought the Unamuno volume hoping to rally my morale for reading
a book Nabokov famously judged “cruel and crude.”
Unamuno criticizes
the reputation of Don Quixote in
Spain, where “erudition tends to mask the fetid sore of moral cowardice that
has poisoned our collective soul [that word again].” He goes on:
“They pick
out a book here and there, extracting sentences and doctrines which they put together
and stew, or they spend a year or two
or twenty rummaging around through files and stacks of papers in some archive
or other so that they may announce this or that discovery. The object is to
avoid looking into one’s heart and plumbing it, to avoid thinking and, even
more, feeling.”
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