For instinct shows us the work we have to do and intelligence provides the pretexts for evading it. Excuses have absolutely no place in art, mere intentions do not count for anything, the artist has to listen to his instinct all the time, with the result that art is the most real thing there is, the most austere school of life, and the true Last Judgment. That book, the most painful of all to decipher, is also the only one dictated to us by reality, the only one whose “impression” has been made in us by reality itself. Whatever the ideas that may have been left in us by our life, their
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