With the Malta Book Festival next week, Marie Benoît looks at the endless fascination of the printed word
Montaigne, the French thinker and a bestseller for at least 400 years, confessed to needing three kinds of communion - love, friendship and books.
Throughout the ages, men and women who have influenced human thought and behaviour have loved books. In spite of technological advances, books go on streaming from the presses on every new activity. In the 21st century, the book and other printed media - newspapers and magazines - are still indispensable for much of the population. Perhaps this is because the written word is the only medium that gets directly inside, to our interior life. The place of the printed language as a "time-binder", in Alfred Korzybski's words, is essential to the transmission of the thoughts and ideas basic to an advanced culture.
The literary masterpieces of Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Mark Twain and so many others bear the unmistakable stamp of the author and are not easily confused with each other.
These giants transformed the products of the imagination into imperishable writing that still speaks to the hearts and minds, after generations, to literate people everywhere.
They had one thing in common. They were also readers. For those who do not read cannot possibly write.
We are all influenced by what we read and it is through reading that we gain penetrating insights. Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) in La Divina Commedia recognised Virgil as his guide. After the death of Beatrice, his ideal woman and symbol of spiritual love, Dante fell under the spell not only of Virgil but Ovid too, the religious works of Thomas Aquinas and medieval authors like Saint Bonaventure.
One of Gustave Flaubert's crucial literary encounters was with Goethe's Faust in a French translation. Twenty years after he read it, some of the poet's preoccupation with good and evil, honour and temptation and the conflict in values stayed in his consciousness and found its way into Madame Bovary.
Writing requires hard work more than genius. Anthony Trollope began his writing day at five in the morning and finished it by breakfast time, after which he would go to his work at the Post Office. This involved almost constant travel to places near and far and immense physical exertion (he was easily capable of walking 24 miles a day). Trollope's own mother, Frances, wrote 41 books herself, starting her day's work at four and joining the family for breakfast at eight.
That fabulous storyteller Daphne Du Maurier managed to combine writing with the move-about life of a soldier's wife, house-keeping and caring for three children.
Joseph Conrad lived most of his life in debt and found writing difficult, akin to quarrying. Three hundred words a night exhausted him. But there was his wife Jessie to provide comfort. He had proposed to her on the steps of the National Gallery in London, after which they had lunch, followed by food-poisoning! Jessie was "a good and reposeful mattress... An assuagement of life's vibrations".
Books can take us out of ourselves. None of us have had enough personal experience to know other people - or ourselves thoroughly. From books we learn that others, great men and women, have suffered and have sought solace as we have. Books are our gateway into other minds and other people.
François Mauriac, in his Memoires Interieurs writes: "The little that we know of ourselves is sometimes what has been suggested to us, in a low voice, by some character in a book."
Reading is an essential activity as it also gives us inner resources to fall back on, and it is a pity that many of our youngsters do not read. They speak in a mass language, full of clichés. What else can you expect from evening upon evening of TV channel-hopping and computer games. Everything we read and certain programmes on TV affect us for better or for worse, and the vulgarization or trivialization of the mind is a terrible tragedy given that we are capable of a higher self. But the prevailing ethos is to lower the mind and the fodder fed us is a kind of psychic murder.
Man lives in two realms, the internal and the external. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. So much of modern life can be summarized in that suggestive phrase of Thoreau: "Improved means to an unimproved end."
Good books can change how people think and feel. Books lead you out of your much too personal and self-imprisoned view of life. That's an important value and function of literature. And then of course one reads for sheer pleasure, both conscious and unconscious. When I was running a town library in Mauritius many years ago, the wives of sugar estate managers and owners used to come to the Carnegie Library I ran in chauffeur-driven cars (their hair in rollers!) and borrow as many blockbusters as they could and have them carried to their car. This sort of reading is neither literary nor intellectual. It is narcotic. Five-thousand word daydreams: I Spurned My Husband the Count for the Gardener; monthly regurgitations of book clubs and historical sagas are the opium of housewives and tired businessmen. This sort of drug is no more harmful to the addict than a bridge club or my relationship with Kit Kat. In John Fowles words: "...being willy-nilly 'lost' in a book; but also being able to analyse how the words are chosen and arranged, and working out what effect they are having on you".
The body gradually dies. Even the emotions become duller. But the mind in most of us continues to live. We can drink ourselves to death, work ourselves to death, even eat ourselves to death. But nobody has ever read himself to death. Yet another reason to read more.