The Solitude of Compassion Read Free

‘If you put out all the lamps, Papa, you won’t be able to see any more.’
    At that moment the velvet eyes were still and they were looking beyond my glorious youth.
    That is true,’ he replied, ‘the wounds illumine. That is true. You listen to Odripano a good deal. He has had experience. If he can stay young amongst us it is because he is a poet. Do you know what poetry is? Do you know that what he says is poetry? Do you know that, son? It is essential to realize that. Now listen. I, too, have had my experiences, and I tell you that you must put out the wounds. If, when you get to be a man, you know these two things, poetry and the science of extinguishing wounds, then you will be a man.’
    I beg the reader’s indulgence for quoting at such length from Giono’s works. If I thought for one moment that most everyone
was familiar with Giono’s writings I would indeed be embarrassed to have made these citations. A friend of mine said the other day that practically everyone he had met knew Jean Giono. “You mean his books?” I asked. “At least some of them,” he said. “At any rate, they certainly know what he stands for.” “That’s another story,” I replied. “You’re lucky to move in such circles. I have quite another story to tell about Giono. I doubt sometimes that even his editors have read him. How to read , that’s the question.”
    That evening, glancing through a book by Holbrook Jackson, 3 I stumbled on Coleridge’s four classes of readers. Let me cite them:
    1. Sponges, who absorb all they read, and return it nearly in the same state, only a little dirtied.
    2. Sand-glasses, who retain nothing, and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time.
    3. Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read.
    4. Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also.
    Most of us belong in the third category, if not also in one of the first two. Rare indeed are the mogul diamonds! And now I wish to make an observation connected with the lending of Giono’s books. The few I possess—among them The Song of the World and Lovers are never Losers , which I see I have not mentioned—have been loaned over and over again to all who expressed a desire to become acquainted with Jean Giono. This means that I have not only handed them to a considerable number of visitors but that I have wrapped and mailed the books to numerous others, to some in foreign lands as well. To no author I have recommended has there been a response such as hailed the reading of Giono. The reactions
have been virtually unanimous. “Magnificent! Thank you, thank you!” that is the usual return. Only one person disapproved, said flatly that he could make nothing of Giono, and that was a man dying of cancer. I had lent him The Joy of Man’s Desiring . He was one of those “successful” business men who had achieved everything and found nothing to sustain him. I think we may regard his verdict as exceptional. The others, and they include men and women of all ages, all walks of life, men and women of the most diverse views, the most conflicting aims and tendencies, all proclaimed their love, admiration and gratitude for Jean Giono. They do not represent a “select” audience, they were chosen at random. The one qualification which they had in common was a thirst for good books…
    These are my private statistics, which I maintain are as valid as the publisher’s. It is the hungry and thirsty who will eventually decide the future of Giono’s works.
    There is another man, a tragic figure, whose book I often thrust upon friends and acquaintances: Vaslav Nijinsky. His Diary is in some strange way connected with Blue Boy . It tells me something about writing. It is the writing of a man who is part lucid, part mad. It is a communication so