I have outgrown the habit of reading. I no longer read anything
except occasional newspapers, light literature and casual books
technical to any matter I may be studying and in which simple
reasoning may be insufficient.
The definite type of literature I have almost dropped. I could
read it for learning or for pleasure. But I have nothing to learn,
and the pleasure to be drawn from books is of a type that can with
profit be substituted by that which the contact with nature and the
observation of life can directly give me.
I am now in full possession of the fundamental laws of literary
art. Shakespeare can no longer teach me to be subtle, nor Milton to
be complete. My intellect has attained a pliancy and a reach that
enable me to assume any emotion I desire and enter at will into any
state of mind. For that which it is ever an effort and an anguish to
strive for, completeness, no book at all can be an aid.
This does not mean that I have shaken off the tyranny of the
literary art. I have but assumed it only under submission to myself.
I have one book ever by me — Pickwick Papers. I have read
Mr. W. W. Jacobs' books several times over. The decay of the
detective story has closed for ever one door I had into modern
writing.
I have ceased to be interested in merely clever people — Wells,
Chesterton, Shaw. The ideas these people have are such as occur to
many non-writers; the construction of their works is wholly a
negative quantity.
There was a time when l read only for the use of reading. I now
have understood that there are very few useful books, even in such
technical matters as I can be interested in.
Sociology is wholesale [ . . . ]; who can stand this scholasticism
in the Byzantium of today?
All my books are books of reference. I read Shakespeare only in
relation to the «Shakespeare Problem»: the rest I know
already.
I have found out that reading is a slavish sort of dreaming. If I
must dream, why not my own dreams?
[...]
Fernando Pessoa
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