Blog — Intentions

To write… for what?

One can write, like Plato, to stimulate reflection in others; like Homer, to sing tales; like Aristotle and men of science, to investigate the truth; like Rabelais, Gogol, and Swift, to satirize; like Pascal, Milton, and Kierkegaard, to understand God; like Spinoza, to be quit of God; like Dalí and Johnson, to make money; like Hölderlin and Kant, to philosophize; like Keats and Gilberto Owen, to mourn one’s sorrows; like Borges and Shakespeare, to entertain; like Poe and Lovecraft, to disquiet; like Menéndez Pelayo, to educate; like Montaigne, to know oneself; like Michelstaedter, to annihilate oneself; like Nietzsche, to consecrate oneself; like Balzac, to compete with the civil registry; like Goethe, to free oneself from Shakespeare; like Byron, to purge oneself of ills; like Quevedo and Góngora, to quarrel; like Johannes Climacus, to doubt; like Proust, to remember; like Wilde, to astonish; like Chesterton and Cervantes, for amusement; like Alfonso Reyes, for pleasure; like Pessoa, out of inertia; like Virgil, by commission; like Henry James, out of duty; like Kafka, out of necessity; like Dante, to court; like myself, to provoke; but to write to be read, that vulgar indecency proper to quacks and beggars, is even infinitely worse than writing, like Schopenhauer and Cioran, to detest and complain.

2020