Civilizations Exist Only to Produce Art and Literature

 There are people who truly suffer because they weren't able, in real life, to live with Mr. Pickwick or to shake Mr. Wardle's hand. I'm one of those people. I've wept genuine tears over that novel, for not having lived in that time and with those people, real people.

  The disasters of novels are always beautiful, because the blood in them isn't real blood and those who die in them don't rot, nor is rottenness rotten in novels.

  When Mr. Pickwick is ridiculous he's not ridiculous, for it all happens in a novel. Perhaps the novel is a more perfect life and reality, which God creates through us. Perhaps we live only to create it. It seems that civilizations exist only to produce art and literature; words are what speak for them and remain. How do we know that these extra-human figures aren't truly real? It tortures my mind to think this might be the case . . .

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, Ch. 195

OK, I told you I was hooked on The Book of Disquiet, so expect many more passages to find their way into this blog. I was trying to explain to Janet the other day that one of the most amazing and beautiful things about the book is that there are worlds within worlds, and just about the time you figure out the protagonist (one of Pessoa's famous heteronyms) you are led somewhere else unexpected. One would not have expected this elegiac paean to a Dickens novel - and, more generally, to all literature and culture - from the seemingly cynical Bernardo Soares. That said, Soares (again, a Pessoa heteronym) is a dreamer, and the path to doing anything is to do nothing, and instead dream. Of course, this passage jumps out at me because I essentially agree with it. It's doubtless why I used to view my history classes through the lenses of art and literature, and why I torture my students now with Crime and Punishment or the Shahnameh or Journey to the West or Winesburg, Ohio or Kafka on the Shore - or, soon, The Book of Disquiet.

Oh, and I'm definitely tackling The Pickwick Papers next, a novel which, criminally, I've only read portions.