I’m not a writer even thought I’d like to be.
I have a few ideas, I try to express them more or less correctly, and I have a respect that occasionally is similar to a kind of veneration for a good and elegant use of prose. I’m very sensitive to the vibrations of words, but I’m not a writer.
Nevertheless when it happens to me to read some best-sellers where all is based on the plot to capture the superficial readers’ attention, forcing them to wonder what is going to happen next, just to forget the banality of a prose without any nuance, before putting them asides without any intention to finish reading, I cannot help thinking that maybe, with a little concentration and some discipline I might write something not that worse than that.
But when I read and read again the pure and shining rich prose of some infinitely great authors I just feel like throwing my virtual pen away and to not write anymore, a simple postcard text either...
I have this deep feeling in a special way when I read Borges.
Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires and died in Geneva.
The second part of his long life had been a long, slow twilight, since he had lost his sight gradually until he became completely blind.
What can be crueler for a writer and a learned, passionate reader than blindness?
I deeply admire the vibrancy of his literary style in both prose and poetry, the sober depth; the incredibly smart and accurate use of adjectives, his liking for oxymora.
One of his sentences came to my mind.
"I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does."
After that the only think I might add is a thoughtful silence.