Autor: Sertillanges A. D. (Gilbert)

Buch: The Intellectual Life

Titel: The Intellectual Life

Stichwort: Kreative Arbeit; Schreiben - Stil; wahr, nicht gekünstelt, einfach; Austausch zw. Seele und Sprache

Kurzinhalt: "Style is the man." ... "Look in thy heart and write," said Sidney. The man who writes like that, without pride or artifice, as if it were for himself, is in reality speaking for humanity ...

Textausschnitt: Chapter 8 - Creative Work

I. Writing
II. Detachment from Self and the World
III. Constancy, Patience, and Perseverance
IV. Doing Things Well and Finishing Everything
V. Attempting Nothing beyond One's Powers
I
Writing ()eü)

1/8 You have come now to the moment for producing results. One cannot be forever learning and forever getting ready. Moreover, learning and getting ready are inseparable from a certain amount of production, which is helpful to them. One finds one's way only by taking it. All life moves in a circle. An organ that is used grows and gets strong; a strong organ can be used more effectively. You must write throughout the whole of your intellectual life. (199; Fs) (notabene)
2/8 In the first place one writes for oneself, to see clearly into one's personal position and problems, to give definition to one's thoughts, to keep up and stimulate attention which sometimes flags if not kept on the alert by activity—to make a beginning on lines of investigation which prove to be necessary as one writes, to encourage oneself in an effort that would be wearisome in the absence of some visible result, lastly to form one's style and acquire that possession which puts the seal on all the others, the writer's art. (199f; Fs)

When you write, you must publish, as soon as good judges think you capable of it and you yourself feel some aptitude for that flight. The young bird knows when he can venture into space; his mother knows it more surely. Relying on yourself and on a wise maternity of the spirit, fly as soon as you can. (200; Fs)

3/8 Contact with the public will compel you to do better; well-deserved praise will stimulate you; criticism will try out your work; you will be, as it were, forced to make progress instead of stagnating, which might be the result of perpetual silence. To father some intellectual work is to sow a good and fruitful seed. Every work is a wellspring.

Pere Gratry insists strongly on the efficacy of writing. He would like people always to meditate pen in hand; and to devote the untroubled morning hour to this contact of the mind with itself. We must take account of varying individual dispositions; but it is certain that for the majority of people, the pen as it runs plays the part of the trainer at games. (200; Fs)

4/8 To speak is to listen to one's soul and to the truth within it. To speak alone and wordlessly, as one does by writing, is to listen and perceive truth with a freshness of sensation like that of a man who rises in the early morning and holds his ear to nature. (200; Fs) (notabene)

Everything must have a beginning. "The beginning is more than the half of the whole," said Aristotle. If you produce nothing you get a habit of passivity; timidity grows continually and the fear caused by pride; you hesitate, waste your powers in waiting, become as unproductive as a knotted tree-bud. (200f; Fs)

5/8 I have said that the art of writing requires long and early application and that this gradually becomes a mental habit and constitutes what is called style. My style, my pen, is the intellectual instrument which I use to express myself and to tell others what I understand of eternal truth. This instrument is a quality of my being, an interior bent, a disposition of the living brain, that is, it is a particular evolution of my self. "Style is the man." (201; Fs) (notabene)

6/8 Therefore in each person the style is formed according as the writer himself is formed; silence is a diminution of the personality. If you want fully to exist from the intellectual point of view, you must know how to think aloud, to think explicitly, that is to shape both within you and for the outside world the word which is the expression of your mind. (201; Fs)

Perhaps it is in place here to say briefly what style should be if it is to correspond to the aim we have been suggesting to the intellectual.

7/8 Alas! In order to venture to say how to write, one should oneself abstain. It is not difficult to be humble when one has fallen under the spell of a master style, or experienced the resulting sense of liberation and expansion in reading, say Pascal, La Fontaine, Bossuet, Montaigne. One can at least acknowledge the idea one is aiming at and falling short of; to describe it is to admit one's shortcomings, but it does one honor to prize what passes judgment on one's own writing. (201f; Fs)

The qualities of style may be set out under as many headings as you will; but they can all be contained, I think, in these three words: truth, individuality, and simplicity; unless you prefer to sum it all up in a single formula; one must write truly. (202; Fs)

8/8 A style is true when it corresponds to a necessity of thought and when it keeps intimate contact with things.

The expression of thought in word is an act of life: it must not stand for a clean cut in life, which is what happens when we fall into artificiality, conventionality, what M. Bergson would call the "ready-made." To write with one part of one's being, to live one's sincere and spontaneous life with another, is an insult to the spoken word and to the harmonious unity of human nature. (202; Fs)
9/8 The ceremonial discourse is the type of those things that are said because they have to be said, in which the thought is merely an effort at apt expression, an expenditure of that eloquence which is the laughingstock of genuine eloquence.1 And indeed the ceremonial discourse is often but a mere passing impersonal thing. There may be genius in it — Demosthenes and Bossuet are examples; but that only happens if the occasion draws from our substance something that would in any case surge up of itself, something connected with our habitual outlook, our constant meditations. (202f; Fs)

The virtue of the word, spoken or written, is abnegation and sincerity: abnegation which puts our personality aside lest it mar the exchange between truth speaking within and the listening soul; sincerity which expresses simply what inspiration has revealed, with no addition of verbiage. (203; Fs) (notabene)

10/8 "Look in thy heart and write," said Sidney. The man who writes like that, without pride or artifice, as if it were for himself, is in reality speaking for humanity, provided he has the talent that will carry true words far and wide. Humanity will recognize itself in him, because it is human nature that has inspired the discourse. Life recognizes life. If I give my neighbor just black marks on white paper, he will perhaps look at the thing curiously, but then he will throw it down; if I am like a tree offering foliage and fruit full of rich sap, if I give my whole self, I will convince him, and like Pericles, leave the dart in men's souls. (203; Fs) (notabene)

If I obey the laws of thought, I cannot but show myself in close contact with things, or rather in the heart of things. Thinking is conceiving what is; writing truly, that is writing according to one's thought, is revealing what is, not stringing sentences together. And so the secret of writing is to stand and study things ardently, until they speak to you and themselves determine their own expression. (203f; Fs)

11/8 Speech and writing must correspond to the truth of life. The listener is a man; the speaker must not be a shadow. The listener brings you a soul to heal or to enlighten; do not put him off with words. While you are developing your periods, he must be able to look outside himself and within himself, and to feel the correspondence with what you say. (204; Fs)

Truth in style avoids the stereotyped expression, the cliché. A cliché is an old truth, a formula that has become common property, a set of words that once was fresh, and is no longer so precisely because it has lost contact with the reality whence it sprang—because it floats in the air, a silly foolish tinsel ornament that takes the place of a flow of living metal, of a direct and immediate transcription of the idea. (204; Fs)

12/8 As Paul Valéry observes, it is automatic use that kills languages. We are alive, he says, when we use syntax "with full consciousness," taking trouble watchfully to bring out every element, avoiding certain effects that arise of themselves and obtrusively claim priority. That claim is precisely the reason for turning away these parasites, these intruders, these unwanted visitors. (204; Fs)

Greatness of style consists in discovering the essential links between the elements of thought and in expressing them with an art that completely excludes every tentative approximation. What an ideal2 that is which Emerson formulates, to write as the dew is deposited on the leaf, and stalactites on the walls of the grotto, as the flesh grows out of the blood, and the woody fiber of the tree is formed from the sap! (204f; Fs)

13/8 We said that the proud and disturbing element in personality will be absent from such writing; but the personal quality of the expression will be all the clearer and more pronounced. What comes out of me, independently of me, must of necessity resemble me. My style is my countenance. A countenance has the general characteristics of the species, but it always has a striking and incommunicable individuality; it is unique in the world and in all the ages; that is, in part, what gives such a fascinating interest to portraits. (205; Fs) (notabene)

14/8 Now, our mind is certainly still more original; but we hide it behind general formulas that we have picked up, behind traditional phrases, word combinations that merely represent old habits and not our own ardor of conviction. To show our mind as it is, basing ourselves on acquired habits of expression common to all, but not losing ourselves in them, would be to rouse inexhaustible interest, and it would be art. (205; Fs)

The style that suits a mind is like the body that belongs to a soul, or the plant that grows from a particular seed; it has its own proper structure. To imitate is to forego your thought; to write without character is to declare it vague or puerile. (205; Fs)

15/8 One should never write "in the manner of" so-and-so, even if the so-and-so were oneself. One must not have a manner; truth has none; it is there, objectively real; it is always fresh and new. But truth cannot fail to have an individual ring on each of its instruments. (205f; Fs)
"All really great men have been original," writes Jules Lachelier;3 "but they did not aim at it nor think themselves so; on the contrary, it was by trying to make of their words and acts an adequate expression of reason that they found the particular form under which they were destined to express it." (206; Fs)

Every instrument has its timbre. If mannerism is an affectation, genuine originality is a manifestation of truth; it intensifies instead of weakening the impression to be produced on the reader, who in his turn will take in what he can, according to his own capacity. What we are proscribing is not the personal feeling which renews and glorifies everything it touches, but self-assertiveness setting itself up against the sway of truth. (206; Fs)

16/8 Simplicity of style results from these principles. Embellishment is an offense against thought, unless it be an expedient to conceal its void. There are no embellishments in the real; there are only organic necessities. Not that there is no brilliance in nature; but the brilliance itself is organic, it has its rightful existence, it is supported by substructures that never break down. (206; Fs)

In nature, the flower is as important a thing as the fruit, and the foliage as the branch; the whole springs from the roots and is but the manifestation of the germ which holds within itself the idea of the species. Now style, in a good workman's hand, imitates the creations of nature. A sentence, a passage, must be constituted like a living branch, like the fibers of a root, like a tree. Nothing super-added, nothing aside, everything in the direct unbroken curve that goes from germ to germ—from the germ that has come to fruition in the writer to that which is to come to fruition in the reader and to propagate truth or human goodness. (206f; Fs)

17/8 Style is not for its own sake; to attach importance to it on its own account is to misuse and degrade it. How little one must care about truth to let oneself be caught by form, to become a rhymester instead of a poet, a stylist instead of a writer! He who has the necessary talent should carry his style to perfection, which is the right of everything that exists; everyone legitimately wishes to become as expert in writing as an old blacksmith at his iron work; but the blacksmith does not amuse himself twisting his metal into ornamental curves, he makes bars, locks, gates. (207; Fs)

18/8 Style excludes everything useless; it is strict economy in the midst of riches; it spends whatever is necessary, saves in one place by skillful arrangement, and lavishes its resources elsewhere for the glory of the truth. Its role is not to shine, but to set off the matter; it must efface itself, and it is then that its own glory appears. "The beautiful is the removal of all superfluity," said Michelangelo, and Delacroix points out in him "the big settings, the simple cheek lines, the noses broadly drawn." He notes that such a style can only fit in with very firm contours as in Michelangelo, Leonardo, and especially Velasquez; but not in Van Dyck; and that too is a lesson. (207f; Fs)

Strive to write in the form that is inevitable, given the precise thought or the exact feeling that you have to express. Aim at being understood by all, as is fitting when a man speaks to men, and try to reach whatever in them is directly or indirectly an instrument of truth. "A complete style is that which reaches all souls and all their faculties."4 (208; Fs)

19/8 Do not court fashion; your time will of itself influence you and will subordinate itself to the uses of eternity. Give your readers pure spring water, not bitter drugs. Many writers today have a system: every system is a pose, and every pose is an insult to beauty. (208; Fs) (notabene)
Cultivate the art of omission, of elimination, of simplification: that is the secret of strength. The masters end by repeating only that which St. John repeated: "Love one another." The innocent nudity which reveals the splendor of living forms—thought and reality, creations and manifestations of the Word—is the law and the prophets in the matter of style. (208; Fs)

20/8 Unfortunately this bare purity of the mind is rare; when it does exist it is often allied with empty-headedness. And so only two kinds of mind, the mind of limited power and the mind of genius, seem predisposed to simplicity; the others have to acquire it laboriously, cumbered by their possessions, and unable to limit themselves at their will. (208; Fs)