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Here they stand on the shelves, one beside another, in diverse languages, of many conceptions and kinds, varying in their tendencies, careless of themselves and not noticing the other living and non-living things in the room; motionless and undemanding, and yet – mark them! – they are proud and self-assured, as if every one of them was saying, “We know what we know, and who knows more?!” But that is only when things – living and on-living – treat them just like anything else needed to keep the shelves from beying empty, and with no regard for what they contain. But come to their utterance with a respect as great as the pain with which their authors in creative moments redeemed them, and what they say about themselves is instantly different: there are many things between heaven and earth of which our wisdom has no inkling, as one of them says plainly.

I would like though – you say – such books as contain a clear and comprehensible written account of everything that is, if not between heaven and earth, then in heaven and on earth, or at the very least, on earth only. I would like – you articulate your wish in more detail – the sort of booklets from which I can learn at least so much about the world, people and life, that I will never be overtaken by the unexpected.

Do not search, – the poetry books, novels, but also the books of instruction will

say in chorus, – do not search, we have none ot that kind in our midst!

So then – you’ll say ironically. – What do we get from books, and what are they

good for? It seems that the proverbial monk who had lots aaf books and had learnt nothing from any of them is not the one whom we should hold up to ridicule, but rather the books themselves, which were unable to say anything to him.

The books will turn silent and will not answer. No, they won’t be offended, they’ll

not take vengeance on you or tell you you’re a dunce, they’ll just carry on leaning indifferently one against the other or lying in the spot where you laid them, unmoving, and you’ll learn nothing at all from them, because they are incapable of saying anything to haughtiness and conceit. They demand humility, percipience, and the will to grasp what they themselves know and have to say. And when you approach them in this way, they will tell you more than is actually in them.

���������������������� Don’t be defiant, for you won’t win, in their patience they are more powerful than you; go to them in such a manner as we advise, and they will forgive you without penances and without reproach.

���������������������� Look, how talkative they are!

Knowledge – my friend – has no terminus. And likewise beauty, joy and sorrow do not have a boundary beyond which there is nothing else. Knowing, that is like a journey to the bounds of the horizon. If your sight is good, in fine weather you can discern their outlines. But go to them. You won’t touch them, you won’t be able to rest beneath them, if you are perceptive though, they’ll open up vistas of lands forever new and worlds forever other. Thus knowledge engenders only new knowledge, but never that which you desired from us: an exact and definitive expression of ’what is’. That is true of the discovery of invisible human feelings and interpersonal relationships, just as it is true of the discovery of visible human life possibilities.

A certain Icarus, whose unexampled courage is recorded in one of us, at some time in the distant past when airborne voyaging was the privilege of the birds of heaven, imitated their flight, and it was he first of all who launched himself into the sky by his own human power. He overcame impossibility, and you yourself know best that his fantastic deed was not a culmination, but brave as is was, still it was only a humble beginning of humanity’s efforts to rule the air. And just look at the shelves! Beside this poetic fantasy of the first flight you will find among us a heap of books which tell, with an engineer’s sobriety, concretely and instructively, of flying across continents, oceans and poles. – Deceiving books! – you object, untrustingly, – you speak of Icarus as an exemplary, heroic model, who can and perhaps even should encourage others. Is this wise? Are you not luring those who trust in your wisdom to destruction? Isn’t precisely his eyample cautionary and instructive only in this sense, that to soar after a lofty goal is disaster for the human being, and his will and intelligence to overcome impossibilities is the sure starting-point of his ruin? You exalt on high his flight to the sun, but in my opinion, more than that you should warningly emphasise his horrific fall!

– What you say is not wrong, my friend – all the books without exeption will say to you, – what you say is not wrong, but we will not advise any differently. There is no knowledge without sacrifice, just as there is no love. To know the secrets of Olympus without risking the fate of Prometheus is not possible. In a certain sense, each pf us has within us the blood of our authors, transfused.

Indeed, we will go further: that flight of Icarus, which we offered as an example, was not the only one which exacted the lives of its pioneers, and not only the great revolutionary discoveries burned up the lives of their trail-blazers. The creation of litrary works, novels, poems, is subject too to this condition of things. One of us puts this prettily, “but mind you, with a certain scientific validity”, in the words of Gautier:

“The fears which parents have whenever a son of theirs is found to possess that misfortunate gift of poetry are, alas, altogether well-founded, and the reproaches directed by the poet’s biographers at fathers and mothers, for their unintelligence and prosaism, are unjust. The parents are perfectly right. What a wretched life he commits himself to, whoever sets out on that painful road which we call the writer’s way of life!

From that day he is obliged to regard himself as cut off from other people. Every feeling becomes for him an object of analysis. Willy-nilly he is divided in two, and because there is no other subject he becomes a spy upon himself. When he needs a corpse, he stretches out on a floor of black marble, and by one of those miracles frequent in literature he plunges a knife in his own heart.

And what cruel struggles he must undergo with Thought, that incomprehensible Proteus which takes all shapes upon itself so as to escape embrace, and yields its prophecy only when forced t display its true shape! And when finally that thought lies, terrified and trembling, under the victor’s knee, one must resurrect it and clothe it in the garb of style, which is so difficult to weave, colour and cut into severe or graceful folds. That long-drawn-out game vexes the nerves, inflames the brain and causes a diseased sensitivity, hence the onset of neurosis with its bizarre disquiet, hallucination-filled sleeplessness, inexplicable torments, sick fancies, appalling perversions, feelings of causeless disquiet and revulsion, lunatic energies and debilitating griefs.”

That Frenchman is not exaggerating, and if you consider the tragic lives of our own most notable authors, they are like a seal of confirmation on his statements.

– And tell me then, you distinguished books, – at length you raise objection once again, – are you not too dearly bought, when you yourselves admit, indeed you boast, that you are paid for with what is most expensive of all, human life?

The books will smile at you benevolently, but they are perfectly rady to answer, and most of all those which were created with the greatest sacrifice. And they will say this much to you: No, my dear! Our life, redeemed with the lives of our creators, is not at all expensive, nor even fully paid for, because we ourselves are life, and wherever people desire to understand and do understand us, we transform life and we create life. And what is greater than this calling? What price is not worth paying?

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Translated by John Minahane