From Silent Catastrophes, which was published last month by Random House. Translated from the German by Jo Catling.

Few have reflected as thoroughly as Elias Canetti upon the fateful processes of our century—the rise of fascism, the murder of the Jews, the scale of atomic annihilation—and like few other writers, he had, in the course of his own development, the insight to realize that representations of the end will not suffice. His ideal is not the prophet but the teacher, whose great good fortune is that learning never ends. Whereas the ruler always remains in one place, the learner is always on a journey:

Learning has to be an adventure, otherwise it’s stillborn. What you learn at a given moment ought to depend on chance meetings, and it ought to continue in that way, from encounter to encounter, a learning in transformations, a learning in fun.

The central activity of the learner, however, is not writing, but reading: “Read until the eyelashes are almost audible with fatigue.” The knowledge the learner accumulates is not possession, not education, and not power; it remains presystemic, and is, at most, a function of studying, which is its main concern. Learning appears identical with life itself. In this, he is part of a long Jewish tradition, in which the ambition of the writer is directed not toward the work which he has created, but to the elucidation of that which is written. The literary form which that illumination takes is that of the excursus, the commentary, and the fragment. It stays true to the objects of contemplation, without devouring them like the pig with the books in the pawnshop. For Canetti, there is a crucial difference between the act of reading and the assimilation of knowledge with a view to power. Freedom, for him, is the “freedom to let go, a giving up of power.” The stance alluded to here is that of the sage, capable of resisting the temptations of the knowledge he bears within him. “From day to day, you grasp more, but you are reluctant to sum up; as though it could ultimately be possible to express everything in a few sentences on some single day, but then definitively.” A few sentences, uttered at the right time—this, for Canetti, would be the correct response to the compulsion of the system, which madness and power and art and science are forever passing down to one another.