I completed the reading of the Le Gardien du feu and immediately immersed myself in Letters to a young poet from Rilke. At the same time, I continue in parallel, the review of Les Mailles sanguines. The comparison of writing breaths is inevitable even if criticism, as Rilke suggests in his first letter, is unnecessary.
Nevertheless, these authors had a literary background that I do not have or that few contemporaries use. Today’s writings seem to me to be more geometric, functional, passionate about unusual materials, unfit for invasion. Paper is no longer that fragile stone that accepts the patina of rewriting by dropping traces, erasures. Sheets on the table that we hesitate to throw away. Now, the keyboard is powerful ammonia, the words are washed, the surfaces reduced to their zero pixels. Unless too many versions are kept too long to be checked, the loss is irreversible.
The first pages of my novel suddenly seem very cold yet efficient. I still cross out sentences, I throw adverbs in the virtual bin, I electronically attach sentences as I am doing now, with the proofreading of this post.
I keep in mind Rilke’s precepts which, in my understanding, are expressed as follows : if your heart asks you to write, listen to what he has to say, do not impose any time limits on you, do not worry about others, they will only understand you if you, only you, can remain faithful to who you are. And if, in the end, they don’t hear you, it doesn’t matter, the creators remain alone and will still have made a difficult journey. Those others also have their passions, their solitudes. They’re no worse or better than you. Their adventure is different. Finally, if your heart asks you to write, don’t write the great things, look for the shadow, the tiny, the intangible, forget the great themes. You will then discover that eternal light will intoxicate each of your moments and you will reach the summits that you had to explore, far from those already mapped so many times.
