A Consideration upon Cicero

Cicero’s letters are magnificent. I have read them many times and I expect to read them many times more. But there is something in them that I cannot quite trust, a quality of the eye always turned sideways toward the mirror. He was, even in his private correspondence, performing. He knew that these letters would be read — he could not not know it — and the knowledge shaped every sentence, often imperceptibly, but always. Even his most intimate disclosures have the quality of a man who has arranged his dishevelment before sitting down.

I do not say this as a criticism, or not only as a criticism. A man who was entirely private in his letters would have left us nothing worth reading. The art requires a reader, and a reader requires that something be done for him. But the distinction I am drawing is one of motive and of ground. Cicero was, at his core, writing to be admired and to be remembered. The Essays of one’s existence, addressed to posterity as a monument, is a different enterprise from the examination of one’s existence, addressed to oneself as a form of understanding.

“I write to no one. Or rather: I write to myself, which is the same as writing to no one, since I already know what I think — except that I do not, quite, until I have written it. The writing is the thinking. There is no audience that precedes it.”

This is what I have attempted, at any rate, in these pages. I am aware that they will be read — they are being published, I am not so naive as to pretend otherwise — but the act of writing them was not shaped by that awareness. I was not, as I wrote, calculating what impression I was making. I was trying to find out what I thought, which is a different operation entirely and one that does not survive the suspicion that someone is watching.

Whether I have succeeded in this is not something I can judge from the inside. I may be as much a performer as Cicero, only less skilled and less conscious of it. That would be a worse failure than his. But I can say that the question I brought to each page was not “what will they think of this?” but “is this true?” — and those are questions that produce different prose.