Am I? I think morality's a matter of knowledge, something you figure out - as compared to the pseudo-morality of gentle harmless people or cause-joiners whose cause only happens to be just. And I think great writers can't help knowing, since they had to know to become great.
Which doesn't mean they're the only people who are moral - I think Hawthorne Turgenev were pretty moral, but I'd put them little above Pushkin and Byron as artists.
I might except great craftsmanship, e.g. that of Alexander Pope or (I guess?) Nabokov, as a kind of 'great writing' that didn't need to be accompanied by great thinking ability. And clearly there needs to be a satirist dispensation. And maybe a deranged-visionary one for e.g. Rimbaud, though he never drifted far from the freed hate school of satire either.
But the people whose books are most worth talking to are the ones able to pay full attention to what we are, and deliver that back with annotations. And that's like twenty, thirty people ever and none of them seem to have been dicks. Not all of them thought Things could be Improved (probably most versions of this hope or its usefulness are absurd, sure) but the ones who didn't tended to be just as charged with sympathy. I suspect deliberate cruelty was something none of them would have been capable of, once they'd come to know what they knew. Some of them performed their more positive actions only through their works, but those were quite extensively, intensively, thoroughly positive actions. Those writings have done an incredible, if unmappable, amount of good.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2010-12-14 04:05 am (UTC)Which doesn't mean they're the only people who are moral - I think Hawthorne Turgenev were pretty moral, but I'd put them little above Pushkin and Byron as artists.
I might except great craftsmanship, e.g. that of Alexander Pope or (I guess?) Nabokov, as a kind of 'great writing' that didn't need to be accompanied by great thinking ability. And clearly there needs to be a satirist dispensation. And maybe a deranged-visionary one for e.g. Rimbaud, though he never drifted far from the freed hate school of satire either.
But the people whose books are most worth talking to are the ones able to pay full attention to what we are, and deliver that back with annotations. And that's like twenty, thirty people ever and none of them seem to have been dicks. Not all of them thought Things could be Improved (probably most versions of this hope or its usefulness are absurd, sure) but the ones who didn't tended to be just as charged with sympathy. I suspect deliberate cruelty was something none of them would have been capable of, once they'd come to know what they knew. Some of them performed their more positive actions only through their works, but those were quite extensively, intensively, thoroughly positive actions. Those writings have done an incredible, if unmappable, amount of good.