Cop(e)ying

The power of a country road when one is walking along it is different from the power from the power it has when one is flying over it by airplane. In the same way, the power of a text when it is read is different from the power it has when it is copied out. The airplane passanger sees only how the road pushes through the landscape, how it unfolds according to the same laws as the terrain surrounding it. Only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power it commands, and of how, from the very scenery that for the flier is only the unfurled plain, it calls forth distances, belvederes, cleaings, prospects at each of its turns like a commander deploying soldiers at a front. Only the copied text thus commands the sould of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of daydreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command. The Chinese practice of copying books was this an incomparable guarantee of literary culture, and the transcript a key to China's enigmas. (Walter Benjamin, One Way Street, p. 447-448)

The ways of literary being

"As a final observation, I should like to add that if it is impossible today for anyone to feel innocent, if in whatever we do or say we can discover a hidden motive -that of a white man, or a male, or the possession of a certain income, or a member of a given economic system, or a sufferer of a certain neurosis -this should not induce in us either a universal sense of guilt or an attitude of universal accusation.

When we become aware of our disease or of our hidden motives, we have already begun to get the better of them. What matter is the way in which accept our motives and live through the ensuing crisis. This is the only chance we have of becoming different from the way we are- that is, the only way of starting to invent a new way of being." (Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature, p. 100)