hy, and his conversations with Eckermann are more interesting than Boswell’s Life of Johnson. 14. Letters During the early 1500’s, collections of Erasmus’ letters were in greater demand than any other book. Voltaire’s letters from Ferney were so lively and witty that they were handed around Paris. It is said that Voltaire’s writing is at its best in his letters. Letter-writing affords writers a freedom that they aren’t afforded by any other type of writing. 15. The most interesting literature is the most personal literature: biographies, autobiographies, diaries, letters and conversations. 16. One of the most valuable services that a writer can perform for a reader is to call his attention to good writers. 17. Maturing Taste Psychologists often say that the individual repeats, in his own development, the development of the human race as a whole. The individual repeats the religious history of mankind by beginning life with the earliest forms of religion, animism and totemism; that is, he begins life by believing that inanimate objects and animals have feelings and thoughts similar to his own. The individual repeats the literary history of mankind by beginning life with the earliest forms of literature, fairy tales and animal fables. By age ten, we’ve graduated from fairy tales to myths, just as mankind once graduated from fairy tales to myths. At fifteen, we’re able to read early novelists like Defoe and Dumas. At twenty, we’re able to read later novelists like Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Not until twenty-five are we able to read twentieth-century novelists like Proust and Joyce. 18. Chekhov depicts people whose romantic visions are shattered by day-to-day living. No matter what they’re doing, they always wish that they were doing something else, and no matter where they are, they always wish that they were somewhere else. They remind one of Socrates’ comment about marriage:...
