Translator: Analia Padin Reviewer: Hélène Vernet
People often ask me
how and why I became a writer.
The easy answer is that I realised early on,
that writing was the only thing I really loved doing
and which I could do reasonably well.
At some point, I fancied myself becoming a scientist,
and even entered UP as an engineering major.
And that’s me, at the Philippine Science High School, 50 years ago,
boring people to tears, which I hope not to do today.
(Laughing)
But I couldn’t hack the math and in any case,
I found words to be more fun than numbers.
And so I’ve resigned myself to becoming a writer for life,
in all senses of writing:
as a journalist, a playwright, a scriptwriter, a fictionist,
a poet and an essayist.
I do all these things, not because I’m brilliant,
but because I write for a living.
Some people live to write, I write to live.
Even so, people who’ve never earned a peso from their writing –
and probably never will – still love to write,
devoting hours if not months of passion
to poems and stories that very few people, if ever, will get to read.
Why do they do that?
Writers have offered all kinds of reasons why they write.
George Orwell, whose 1984 has suddenly become relevant again,
in these Trump and ‘.com’ challenged times,
famously said that writers write for four reasons:
sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm,
historical impulse and political purpose.
Sure, some of us write to be famous, or to change or make history,
but it was the Nobel Prize winner, Toni Morrison,
who, I think, gave the simplest and most honest reason
why we writers write when she said,
‘I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it’.
In other words, we write, first of all,
because we want to amuse and to please ourselves.
And that’s just logical,
because if you can’t enjoy your own work, how can you expect others to do so?
But clearly, many writers don’t just write for themselves.
We’ve something to share with others: ideas, emotions, reactions, predictions,
our sense of the world and what it should be.
Shamelessly, we share our most private feelings with complete strangers,
such as when Pablo Neruda says in a poem,
‘So I wait for you like a lonely house
till you will see me again and live in me.
Till then my windows ache’.
And when we share our loneliness with the world,
somehow we and the world can feel much less lonely.
Another way of answering why we write is to raise the next question:
What do you need to become a writer?
Let me toss out a few ideas.
[‘Natsukashii’: reminding good memories]
First, a love of words,
a fascination with their origins, meanings and uses.
I don’t mean that you should be a walking dictionary or thesaurus,
just someone who’s naturally interested in the names of things,
and who has a mental or even a literal notebook,
where you can store these words.
As an adolescent growing up in Pasig,
I used to spend an hour or two after school
at the Rizal Provincial Library,
where I would flip idly through the pages of the big fat Websters dictionary,
picking up words I would never use – like fennec, a North African fox –
but words I didn’t mind meeting.
It gave me a sense of the world much larger than myself,
which I looked forward to exploring on my own two feet.
Second, a love of books and reading.
There’s no other or better way
you can learn about words and how they behave,
except by reading.
I was a reader before I became a writer.
And I read everything:
The Hardy Boys, history books, science books,
maps, Time magazine, Liwayway.
Third: an insatiable curiosity about the world and the way things work.
We can’t get everything by direct experience
but we can read up on woodworking, jewellery, macramé, gardening,
automotive mechanics and New Zealand, in other words,
things we may not be too interested in ourselves
or think about on ordinary days.
Instead of pondering grand abstractions like love, justice and freedom,
you should cultivate a sense of the materiality of things.
Fourth: an empathy for people, a sense of how they think, feel and act,
and a keen understanding of the workings of human relationships.
It all comes down to people and their motivations,
or why we people do what we do.
Fifth: A sense of narrative,
a desire and the ability to imagine what happened or may have happened.
The Philosopher Susan Langer
once described man as the ‘sensemaking animal’,
suggesting that we got ahead of the other species
because of our ability to connect the dots.
For example, if we drive large prey over the cliff,
they’ll fall to their deaths and we’ll have food for a week.
Narrative and storytelling are basic survival tools.
Sixth: a faith in art – in my case, the art of fiction –
and in its ability to deal with the most complicated human issues and concerns.
Unlike science, art is not fact-based but truth-based.
And often life’s truths can be established not by reason,
but by imagination and intuition.
And this leads me to our next question, which is:
Why should we read?
Why bother with books and literature,
when it seems we can get everything we need on Google and Wikipedia.
To begin with, we’re often told that like the other arts,
literature is what makes us human.
But, what exactly does that mean? How does literature humanise us?
Literature relies on language.
And other animals possess and command a form of language too.
Whales, monkeys, elephants, birds
communicate presumably for the most basic things:
food, sex, danger.
We might even call their most basic utterances:
words and phrases of a kind performing a clear and practical function.
They form sequences of meaning like saying,
‘There is food down there’,
or: ‘I want to make a little baby with you’.
(Laughter)
This is language, but it’s not literature as we know literature.
And why not?
Because literature requires imagination,
dreaming of things beyond the immediate and the practical,
and furthermore, a medium of transmission and preservation
of the products of that imagination.
We’re told that animals can dream,
but they can’t record and communicate those dreams like we do.
Literature is our waking dream,
a dream we describe and share through words.
These dreams, these stories we make up in our minds,
can teach, can delight, can disturb, can enrage, can exhort.
They can remember and can, therefore, preserve our memories,
our thoughts and feelings, as individuals and as a race.
And as far as I know, no other species, nothing and no one else, can do this.
Literature makes us human
because it allows us to tell stories that make sense of our lives,
even stories that never happened, except in our imaginations –
which also makes belief in things like paradise, possible.
Without literature, we cannot acknowledge
and even talk about our inner selves, our inner lives.
That’s something maths or physics can’t do,
at least not in the way of a poet or a novelist.
The appreciation of beauty belongs to this realm of the imaginary,
the recognition of pleasing and meaningful patterns in the seemingly abstract,
as in this poem by the Brazilian poet Augusto de Campos.
[‘Cogito’: I think]
The magic of literature
lies in how it deals with the reality and reason
through fantasy and imagination,
and approaches truth through make-believe, or what we might call ‘the artistic lie’.
Literature makes use of things that don’t exist,
or things that never happened,
to talk about things that do,
because reality is often too painful to confront directly.
As one of my own teachers put it:
art – or literature – is the mirror of Perseus.
That’s because, if you recall the story of the Gorgons,
Perseus could kill Medusa,
whose fatal gaze would have turned him to stone,
only by using his shield as a mirror.
Literature is that sheild.
By deflecting our gaze and seeming to look at other people,
we are able to see the truth about ourselves
in all its harshness and unpleasantness.
Now at this point, I’m going to backtrack a bit
so I can go deeper into another basic argument of why we need to read.
The point is no longer just to say that reading or literature makes us human.
Rather, literature makes us better humans,
by teaching us discernment and critical judgement.
Literature is a history of the words that have made sense of our lives,
like the Bible or the Iliad, or the Noli and Fili.
It shows us at our best and worst, so we can choose how we want to live,
whether as individuals, as citizens or as a society.
To do that,
to help us use both our reason and our imagination,
literature uses language, and language uses words.
Through carefully crafted stories, poems and essays,
literature shows readers
that words are supremely important in becoming a better person.
And this is especially true at a time
when words like ‘friend’
have been devalued by Facebook –
which is why I’m not on Facebook –
(Laughter)
and ‘Hero’,
by those to whom history, honour and honesty,
especially in public service, no longer mean anything.
Remember we are in the age of fake news, post-truths and alternative facts.
Every entry and every post my students make on Facebook and on Twitter,
is a test of how well they have learned their language and their literature.
And I don’t mean their grammar.
I’m talking about their sensibility, the way they think and express themselves.
the way they deal with other people –
especially people holding an adversarial position.
How careful are they with their ideas and with their choice of words?
And it isn’t so much they as we, teachers, who are being tested.
How well have we taught them?
How deeply have we drawn on the wealth of human experience in literature,
to impress upon them that life is full of difficult choices and decisions,
of hard struggles to be fought and won?
To a generation of millennials,
weaned on instant gratification and on tweeting before thinking –
like some people we know –
the complexity of life can be a profound discovery.
This is the first and most important lesson of all literature.
Words have meaning.
And because they have meaning, words have power.
And words have consequences.
Words can hurt.
Words can kill.
But words can also heal.
Words can save.
Words make law.
Words make war.
Words make money.
Words make peace.
Words make nations.
Words are the songs we sing to our loved and lost ones.
Words are the prayers we lift up to the skies.
Words are the deepest secrets we confess.
Words are what we tell our children,
the first thing in the morning, and the last thing at night.
Words are all that some of us,
especially those of us who call ourselves writers,
will leave behind.
700 years ago,
a Persian poet named Hafez, wrote a short but wonderful poem.
[Lighting up the sky] ‘Even after all this time,
the Sun never says to the Earth
“You owe me.”
Look what happens with a love like that.
It lights up the whole sky.’
And this, my friends, is why I write and why you read.
We light up the sky of our minds with love,
the love of ideas,
of our engagement with ourselves, and with the world.
(Filipino) Thank you very much.
(Applause)
People often ask me
how and why I became a writer.
The easy answer is that I realised early on,
that writing was the only thing I really loved doing
and which I could do reasonably well.
At some point, I fancied myself becoming a scientist,
and even entered UP as an engineering major.
And that’s me, at the Philippine Science High School, 50 years ago,
boring people to tears, which I hope not to do today.
(Laughing)
But I couldn’t hack the math and in any case,
I found words to be more fun than numbers.
And so I’ve resigned myself to becoming a writer for life,
in all senses of writing:
as a journalist, a playwright, a scriptwriter, a fictionist,
a poet and an essayist.
I do all these things, not because I’m brilliant,
but because I write for a living.
Some people live to write, I write to live.
Even so, people who’ve never earned a peso from their writing –
and probably never will – still love to write,
devoting hours if not months of passion
to poems and stories that very few people, if ever, will get to read.
Why do they do that?
Writers have offered all kinds of reasons why they write.
George Orwell, whose 1984 has suddenly become relevant again,
in these Trump and ‘.com’ challenged times,
famously said that writers write for four reasons:
sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm,
historical impulse and political purpose.
Sure, some of us write to be famous, or to change or make history,
but it was the Nobel Prize winner, Toni Morrison,
who, I think, gave the simplest and most honest reason
why we writers write when she said,
‘I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it’.
In other words, we write, first of all,
because we want to amuse and to please ourselves.
And that’s just logical,
because if you can’t enjoy your own work, how can you expect others to do so?
But clearly, many writers don’t just write for themselves.
We’ve something to share with others: ideas, emotions, reactions, predictions,
our sense of the world and what it should be.
Shamelessly, we share our most private feelings with complete strangers,
such as when Pablo Neruda says in a poem,
‘So I wait for you like a lonely house
till you will see me again and live in me.
Till then my windows ache’.
And when we share our loneliness with the world,
somehow we and the world can feel much less lonely.
Another way of answering why we write is to raise the next question:
What do you need to become a writer?
Let me toss out a few ideas.
[‘Natsukashii’: reminding good memories]
First, a love of words,
a fascination with their origins, meanings and uses.
I don’t mean that you should be a walking dictionary or thesaurus,
just someone who’s naturally interested in the names of things,
and who has a mental or even a literal notebook,
where you can store these words.
As an adolescent growing up in Pasig,
I used to spend an hour or two after school
at the Rizal Provincial Library,
where I would flip idly through the pages of the big fat Websters dictionary,
picking up words I would never use – like fennec, a North African fox –
but words I didn’t mind meeting.
It gave me a sense of the world much larger than myself,
which I looked forward to exploring on my own two feet.
Second, a love of books and reading.
There’s no other or better way
you can learn about words and how they behave,
except by reading.
I was a reader before I became a writer.
And I read everything:
The Hardy Boys, history books, science books,
maps, Time magazine, Liwayway.
Third: an insatiable curiosity about the world and the way things work.
We can’t get everything by direct experience
but we can read up on woodworking, jewellery, macramé, gardening,
automotive mechanics and New Zealand, in other words,
things we may not be too interested in ourselves
or think about on ordinary days.
Instead of pondering grand abstractions like love, justice and freedom,
you should cultivate a sense of the materiality of things.
Fourth: an empathy for people, a sense of how they think, feel and act,
and a keen understanding of the workings of human relationships.
It all comes down to people and their motivations,
or why we people do what we do.
Fifth: A sense of narrative,
a desire and the ability to imagine what happened or may have happened.
The Philosopher Susan Langer
once described man as the ‘sensemaking animal’,
suggesting that we got ahead of the other species
because of our ability to connect the dots.
For example, if we drive large prey over the cliff,
they’ll fall to their deaths and we’ll have food for a week.
Narrative and storytelling are basic survival tools.
Sixth: a faith in art – in my case, the art of fiction –
and in its ability to deal with the most complicated human issues and concerns.
Unlike science, art is not fact-based but truth-based.
And often life’s truths can be established not by reason,
but by imagination and intuition.
And this leads me to our next question, which is:
Why should we read?
Why bother with books and literature,
when it seems we can get everything we need on Google and Wikipedia.
To begin with, we’re often told that like the other arts,
literature is what makes us human.
But, what exactly does that mean? How does literature humanise us?
Literature relies on language.
And other animals possess and command a form of language too.
Whales, monkeys, elephants, birds
communicate presumably for the most basic things:
food, sex, danger.
We might even call their most basic utterances:
words and phrases of a kind performing a clear and practical function.
They form sequences of meaning like saying,
‘There is food down there’,
or: ‘I want to make a little baby with you’.
(Laughter)
This is language, but it’s not literature as we know literature.
And why not?
Because literature requires imagination,
dreaming of things beyond the immediate and the practical,
and furthermore, a medium of transmission and preservation
of the products of that imagination.
We’re told that animals can dream,
but they can’t record and communicate those dreams like we do.
Literature is our waking dream,
a dream we describe and share through words.
These dreams, these stories we make up in our minds,
can teach, can delight, can disturb, can enrage, can exhort.
They can remember and can, therefore, preserve our memories,
our thoughts and feelings, as individuals and as a race.
And as far as I know, no other species, nothing and no one else, can do this.
Literature makes us human
because it allows us to tell stories that make sense of our lives,
even stories that never happened, except in our imaginations –
which also makes belief in things like paradise, possible.
Without literature, we cannot acknowledge
and even talk about our inner selves, our inner lives.
That’s something maths or physics can’t do,
at least not in the way of a poet or a novelist.
The appreciation of beauty belongs to this realm of the imaginary,
the recognition of pleasing and meaningful patterns in the seemingly abstract,
as in this poem by the Brazilian poet Augusto de Campos.
[‘Cogito’: I think]
The magic of literature
lies in how it deals with the reality and reason
through fantasy and imagination,
and approaches truth through make-believe, or what we might call ‘the artistic lie’.
Literature makes use of things that don’t exist,
or things that never happened,
to talk about things that do,
because reality is often too painful to confront directly.
As one of my own teachers put it:
art – or literature – is the mirror of Perseus.
That’s because, if you recall the story of the Gorgons,
Perseus could kill Medusa,
whose fatal gaze would have turned him to stone,
only by using his shield as a mirror.
Literature is that sheild.
By deflecting our gaze and seeming to look at other people,
we are able to see the truth about ourselves
in all its harshness and unpleasantness.
Now at this point, I’m going to backtrack a bit
so I can go deeper into another basic argument of why we need to read.
The point is no longer just to say that reading or literature makes us human.
Rather, literature makes us better humans,
by teaching us discernment and critical judgement.
Literature is a history of the words that have made sense of our lives,
like the Bible or the Iliad, or the Noli and Fili.
It shows us at our best and worst, so we can choose how we want to live,
whether as individuals, as citizens or as a society.
To do that,
to help us use both our reason and our imagination,
literature uses language, and language uses words.
Through carefully crafted stories, poems and essays,
literature shows readers
that words are supremely important in becoming a better person.
And this is especially true at a time
when words like ‘friend’
have been devalued by Facebook –
which is why I’m not on Facebook –
(Laughter)
and ‘Hero’,
by those to whom history, honour and honesty,
especially in public service, no longer mean anything.
Remember we are in the age of fake news, post-truths and alternative facts.
Every entry and every post my students make on Facebook and on Twitter,
is a test of how well they have learned their language and their literature.
And I don’t mean their grammar.
I’m talking about their sensibility, the way they think and express themselves.
the way they deal with other people –
especially people holding an adversarial position.
How careful are they with their ideas and with their choice of words?
And it isn’t so much they as we, teachers, who are being tested.
How well have we taught them?
How deeply have we drawn on the wealth of human experience in literature,
to impress upon them that life is full of difficult choices and decisions,
of hard struggles to be fought and won?
To a generation of millennials,
weaned on instant gratification and on tweeting before thinking –
like some people we know –
the complexity of life can be a profound discovery.
This is the first and most important lesson of all literature.
Words have meaning.
And because they have meaning, words have power.
And words have consequences.
Words can hurt.
Words can kill.
But words can also heal.
Words can save.
Words make law.
Words make war.
Words make money.
Words make peace.
Words make nations.
Words are the songs we sing to our loved and lost ones.
Words are the prayers we lift up to the skies.
Words are the deepest secrets we confess.
Words are what we tell our children,
the first thing in the morning, and the last thing at night.
Words are all that some of us,
especially those of us who call ourselves writers,
will leave behind.
700 years ago,
a Persian poet named Hafez, wrote a short but wonderful poem.
[Lighting up the sky] ‘Even after all this time,
the Sun never says to the Earth
“You owe me.”
Look what happens with a love like that.
It lights up the whole sky.’
And this, my friends, is why I write and why you read.
We light up the sky of our minds with love,
the love of ideas,
of our engagement with ourselves, and with the world.
(Filipino) Thank you very much.
(Applause)
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