by Maria Popova
“When you come right down
to it, opinions are the most superficial things about anyone.”
Jorge Luis Borges (August 24, 1899–June 14 1986) is among humanity’s most beloved and
influential writers. His work has inspired mathematical
revelations, philosophical
children’s books, and a universe of literature. After his
death, Susan Sontag commemorated him in the
most beautiful homage in the history of letters.
In 1972, in his seventies
and already completely blind, Borges agreed to meet with a young Argentinian
writer and passionate reader named Fernando Sorrentino for a series of
conversations. On seven afternoons, the two men, separated by more than forty
years and united by a profound love of literature, sat down in a secluded room
at the National Library of Argentina and conversed candidly about literature
and life. The record of these revelatory encounters, offering the most direct
glimpse of the beloved author’s mind, was published as Seven Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges (public
library) in 1974 — the same magnificent volume that
gave us Borges’s enduring
wisdom on writing.
In one of the most timeless
yet intensely timely portions of the conversation, Borges examines the question
of success and its true measures through the lens of his extraordinary artistic
integrity and cultural insight. When asked whether he cares about the opinions
of readers and spectators, he considers the difference between literature and
other arts:
It’s possible that a book
won’t attract any attention when it’s published; it may be discovered
afterward. On the other hand, in the case of a film (and this makes everything
more dramatic; the same thing happens, let’s say, with the dancer’s or
performer’s art), the failure or success has to be immediate… I think the
circumstance of a hall filled with people in itself creates a special
atmosphere.
Literature and fine art
seem to share this time-scale of success, quite different from that of the
popular and performance arts. One wonders whether Borges thought of his younger
sister, Norah, in contemplating this question of latent recognition — while she
was an enormously prolific graphic artist during her life, it was only after
her death that she came to be celebrated as a pioneer of
modern art.
Art by Norah Borges.
When people join in a group
they react in a more exaggerated way; this is something you must have noticed
very often. For instance, if someone tells a joke in a small group, people
laugh, but they don’t laugh in the same way that five hundred or a thousand
people laugh when they hear a joke in a play or a movie. That is, there’s a
tendency to greater exaggeration, a tendency for everything to happen in a more
emphatic manner. And it’s strange, the fact that people let themselves go more
when they’re in a group. On the other hand, a solitary reader, a solitary
spectator, seems to have less of a reaction or to react more modestly than when
with other people.
[…]
The solitary reading of a
work is best for its true evaluation. But at any rate, it’s a different kind of
evaluation.
Art by Norah Borges.
Returning to the travesty
of evaluation by popular opinion — something Kierkegaard
lamented and Georgia
O’Keeffe admonished against — Borges observes:
When you come right down to
it, opinions are the most superficial things about anyone.
In a sentiment triply
poignant today, nearly half a century of commercialism later, Borges considers
how the commodification of literature has warped its metrics of success:
It’s possible that the fact
that literature has been commercialized now in a way it never was before has
had an influence. That is, the fact that people now talk about “bestsellers,”
that fashion has an influence (something that didn’t use to happen). I remember
that when I began to write, we never thought about the success or failure of a
book. What’s called “success” now didn’t exist at that time. And what’s called
“failure” was taken for granted. One wrote for oneself and, maybe, as Stevenson
used to say, for a small group of friends. On the other hand, one now thinks of
sales. I know there are writers who publicly announce they’ve had their fifth,
sixth, or seventh edition released and that they’ve earned such and such an
amount of money. All that would have appeared totally ridiculous when I was a
young man; it would have appeared incredible. People would have thought that a
writer who talks about what he earns on his books is implying: “I know what I
write is bad but I do it for financial reasons or because I have to support my
family.” So I view that attitude almost as a form of modesty. Or of plain foolishness.
Art by Norah Borges.
This resonates with
Borges’s earlier remark about the different time-scales of appreciation for
literature versus more commercial arts like film and popular music. The notion
of the “bestseller” shares cultural genes with the “blockbuster” and the “hit”
— notice how very violent our laudatory language tends to be — and yet the
success of literature, Borges suggests and countless other writers have
corroborated, is measured by an entirely
different metric of inner light.
Seven Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges is a magnificent read in its entirety. Complement it with more of the
beloved writer’s wisdom
on writing and a marvelous children’s
book inspired by his ideas about memory, then
revisit Thoreau on defining
your own success.
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/08/24/borges-success/?mc_cid=32c8c0dfcd&mc_eid=4b7757b56b
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