Graphomania

2006-11-04T13:17:00.000-08:00

For everyone who is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that eveyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.

A woman who writes her lover four letters a day is not a graphomaniac. She is a lover. But my friend who makes photocopies of his love letters to publish them someday is a graphomaniac. Graphomania is not a mania write letters, personal diaries, or family chronicles (to write for oneself or one's close relations) but a mania to write books (to have a public of unknown readers...

Graphomania (a mania for writing books) inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions:

(1) an elevated level of general well-being, which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities;

(2) a high degree of social atomization and, as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals;

(3) the absence of dramatic social changes in the nation's internal life. (From this point of view, it seems to me symptomatic that in France, where practically nothing happens, the precentage of writers in twenty-one times higher than in Israel. Bibi is, moreover, right to say that looked at from the outside, she hasn't experienced anything. The mainspring that drives her to write is just that absence of vital content, that void.)

One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and imcomprehension will have arrived.

--From Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Love me!

Graphomania