Sabato Ernesto: Pojedinac i univerzum

Ernesto Sabato: The Individual and the Universe

Argentine writer Ernesto Sabato was born in 1911. He studied mathematics, physics and philosophy, worked on atomic radiation research at the Kiri Laboratory, and then in the USA. He left science around 1945, and since then has devoted himself exclusively to literature. That year, he published his first collection of essays, The Individual and the Universe, which was followed by, among others, People and Gears, Superstition, The Writer and His Ghosts, Apologies and Rejections... All three novels he wrote were translated into Serbian: The Tunnel, About Heroes and Graves and Abaddon, the Angel of Destruction, as well as his memoirs, Before the End and Resistance. In recent decades, he has also been engaged in painting, and even had an exhibition of his paintings in Paris in 1989. The central lines of Sabat's thought presented in the essays are diverse: the vision of the Universe starting from the search for one's own Self ("The Universe that is spoken of here is my private Universe, therefore, incomplete, contradictory and perfectable"), the collapse of Western civilization, the crisis of civilization based on reason and machines (the author here returns to the Renaissance to explain the crisis of art and literature in the modern world and shows himself to be a great connoisseur of the history and culture of the West), essays on hell and dreams, man and woman, life, man, science, literature. Sabat's essays represent "attempts" to repeat the Renaissance endeavor in the middle of the 20th century: his dealings with science and literature, and painting, and even philosophy, compel him - and he himself will come to a similar conclusion in one essay - to make a cursory attempt in each of these areas, because otherwise any deepened and successful attempt in all these directions would be doomed to the impossibility of communication. Sabat's essays are the author's attempt to come to the knowledge of some truth, and they rarely represent a reflection in the text with the intention that the writer reflects his own image: "Personal experiences, precisely because they are personal, have a huge, immeasurable importance for me, but for others they have no evidentiary value", while "extraordinary events" that "go beyond completely private experience" have a greater power of persuasion, and even the power of evidence. When, on the contrary, it is a novel, Sabato considers it quite appropriate to talk about personal experience as well: "Essays are written in the head, referring only to logical thought; they are an expression of the writer's daily life. Novels are written above all thanks to magical thought, the one that reigns in the deepest depths of the unconscious, in what Pascal called les raisons du coeur, the reasons of the heart."