It bothers me that I was seventy-one
years old before
I came to read Ivan Turgenev. I wish I had known him
at eighteen. How helpful it would have been to my life, just to have
sensed his generosity, kindness and maturity.
 |
| Turgenev |
Henry James reports Ernest Renan saying
at the time of Turgenev's death:
His conscience
was not that of an individual to whom nature had been more or less
generous: it was in some sort the conscience of a people. Before he
was born he had lived for thousands of years; infinite successions of
reveries had amassed themselves in the depths of his heart. No man
has been as much as he the incarnation of a whole race: generations
of ancestors, lost in the sleep of centuries, speechless, came
through him to life and utterance.
James goes on to say, “I quote these
lines for the pleasure of quoting them...”
That concept at the end, about giving life and utterance to generations of ancestors,
could not have held in any case as much meaning for me when I was
young as it does now. One of the things that becomes more certain and
clear to me as I reach the end of my life is how far back our minds
go, how deep is our ancestry.
No comments:
Post a Comment