9780816646937.pdf by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
ISBN: 9780816646937
Published: 2007-12-07T21:02:20+00:00

A Last Lecture

· · · · · · · ·

Th

is is in two senses a last lecture, the last of a series of talks I have been giving at the University of California, Santa Barbara, entitled “A Writer and His World.” In another sense, I am going to try to give you what is called a “Last Lecture.” Th is is

something which is done from time to time. My great friend Professor Douwe Stuurman gave such a talk quite some time ago,¹ and the idea is that, without becoming melodramatic, you attempt to say the kind of thing you would say if this were your last lecture — where you really try to sum up your beliefs or the results of your experience, and you try to express these results briefl y, and this is what I am going to try to do tonight.

First of all, I should start with the suggestion that a writer always should write as an individual, fi rst and foremost as an individual. Because, after all, what does he really have? He has only his individual experience. What he knows is his own experience, not somebody else’s — that is only fi ltered through his experience.² Furthermore, I would suggest that one not only writes as an individual but one writes for other individuals. Th ere may be

just a few thousand of these, there may be millions, but ideally speaking one writes for each one of these individuals and not for the mass taken together. Th

is is rather an important point.

Anyway, it’s important to me psychologically to think of writing in this way, and I would even suggest that the opposite — writing for other people as a mass, rather than as a collection of separate individuals — perhaps is one of the diff erences between art and propaganda. I’ll return to this idea again a little bit later.

Being an individual doesn’t necessarily in itself mean that you are cut off from other people or that you feel yourself at vari-ance with them. A writer may belong to a political party which is in the majority and is in power. He may hold opinions which 130

· · · · ·

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.