What was Ivanov afraid of? Ansky wondered in his notebooks. Not of harm to his person, since as a longtime Bolshevik he’d many brushes with arrest, prison, and deportation, and although he couldn’t be called a brave man, neither could it fairly be said that he was cowardly or spineless. Ivanov’s fear was of a literary nature. That is, it was the fear that afflicts most citizens who, one fine (or dark) day, choose to make the practice of writing, and especially the practice of fiction writing, an integral part of their lives. Fear of being no good. Also fear of being overlooked. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear that one’s efforts and striving will come to nothing. Fear of the step that leaves no trace. Fear of the forces of chance and nature that wipe away shallow prints. Fear of dining alone and unnoticed. Fear of going unrecognized. Fear of failure and making a spectacle of oneself. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear of forever dwelling in the hell of bad writers. Irrational fears, thought Ansky, especially when the fearful soothed their fears with semblances. As if the paradise of good writers, according to bad writers, were inhabited by semblances. As if the worth (or excellence) of a work were based on semblances. Semblances that varied, of course, from one era and country to another, but that always remained just that, semblances, things that only seem and never are, things all surface and no depth, pure gesture, and even the gesture muddled by an effort of will, the hair and eyes and lips of Tolstoy and the versts traveled on horseback Tolstoy and the women deflowered by Tolstoy in a tapestry burned by the fire of seeming.
...which links back to both the discussion of semblances in The Part About Fear and the two discussions of minor-v-major works, one also in The Part About Archimboldi, the other in The Part About Amalfitano. Amongst the satisfactions of academic life, I'm not sure there's any that matches mastering a serious, long text. My ability to read and comment on Grotius improved greatly once I had a full understanding of De jure belli as a succession of parts that fit within an overall architecture or plan, and knew which parts went where, and why (few moments in my career were as satisfying as realizing why Grotius' chapter on the rights of burial were at the end of the section on property and not in the section on how to handle the end of a war--this being the point on which most commentators will throw up their hands and admit defeat). It's a real mental discipline, not unlike knowing which solo comes next on Kind of Blue and how it goes.
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