Graphomania

Taking a line from Goethe's West-East Divan: "Is one alive when other men are living?" Hidden within Goethe's question is the mystery of the writer's condition: By writing books, a man turns into a universe (don't we speak of the universe of Chekhov, the universe of Kafka?), and it is precisely the nature of a universe to be unique. The existence of another universe threatens it in its very essense.

Someone who writes books is either everything (a unique universe in himself and to all others) or nothing. And because it will never be given to anyone to be everything, all of us who write books are nothing. We are unrecognized, jealous, embittered, and we wish the others dead.

The irresistable proliferation of graphomania among politicians, taxi drivers, childbearers, lovers, murderers, thieves, prostitutes, officials, doctors and patients shows me that everyone without exception bears a potential writer within him, so that the entire human species has good reason to go down the streets and shout: "We are all writers!"

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

- Milan Kundera

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

1980