Quote from “What is Literature?” by Sartre
"An adolescent choose to write in order to escape an oppression from which he suffers and a solidarity he is ashamed of; as soon as he has written a few words, he thinks he has escaped from his milieu and class and from all milieus and all classes and that he has broken through his historical situation by the mere fact that he has attained reflective and critical knowledge. Above the confusion of those bourgeois and nobles, locked up in their particular age by their prejudices, he has, one taking up his pen, discovered himself as a timeless and unlocalized mind, in short, as a universal mind. And literature, which has delivered him, is an abstract function and an a priori power of human nature; it is the movement whereby at every moment man frees himself from history; in short, it is the exercise of freedom."
If he hadn't started this paragraph with "an adolescent" I would have thought it was a defense of writing as an exercise in emotional and intellectual freedom...but with that beginning, I find myself thinking Sartre believes that freedom is at least in part an illusion, and that an adult understands that the freedom of reading and writing is only partial, and never total. But writing is still the exercise of freedom, even if not absolute freedom...
When I was an adolescent, I lifted weights to become a bad ass. As an adult, my goals are more modest. But weight lifting is still a good idea in of itself, because even if it never makes me "Batman," it means I can help move furniture, pick up a girl from a couch and sit her on my lap, and hopefully not die in a nursing home.
If he hadn't started this paragraph with "an adolescent" I would have thought it was a defense of writing as an exercise in emotional and intellectual freedom...but with that beginning, I find myself thinking Sartre believes that freedom is at least in part an illusion, and that an adult understands that the freedom of reading and writing is only partial, and never total. But writing is still the exercise of freedom, even if not absolute freedom...
When I was an adolescent, I lifted weights to become a bad ass. As an adult, my goals are more modest. But weight lifting is still a good idea in of itself, because even if it never makes me "Batman," it means I can help move furniture, pick up a girl from a couch and sit her on my lap, and hopefully not die in a nursing home.