Chesterton said that, “The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.” Melville noted that, whatever a writer’s talents, he will not achieve literary success unless he also has a strong desire for public recognition and a certain knack for self-promotion—qualities which are always, in themselves, “more or less paltry and base.” This fact, Melville continues, invites us to consider an interesting possibility: That the brilliance of the greatest minds in history has been concomitant with a serene indifference to seeing themselves in print and maybe even to writing itself. These “Divine Inert,” as Melville calls them, would therefore remain totally unknown. “Is it not possible,” asks Poe, as if taking up the baton, “that while a high order of genius is necessarily ambitious the highest may be above ambition? And may it not therefore happen that many far greater than Milton have contentedly remained mute and inglorious?” From these conjectures Melville and Poe both arrive at the same conclusion. We may never see the greatest literary work of which mankind is capable—for the enlightened soul from which it must come would, by virtue of that enlightenment, never lower herself to the writing and peddling of books. [1] Borges had a related idea: The idea of a message so transformatively profound that the one who possesses it feels no concern for his own fate and the fate of the world and so has no desire to communicate that message. In his story The Writing of the God, an imprisoned Aztec priest falls into a trance during which he deciphers a sacred phrase or malediction in the spots of a leopard with whom he shares his prison. To escape confinement, destroy his enemies and become immortal all the priest need do is utter the fourteen apparently random words of the formula—for this will make him omnipotent. But learning the formula has taught him the mysterium tremendum at the heart of Ultimate Reality and so he does not utter it. “He who has glimpsed the burning designs of the universe,” explains the priest, “can have no thought for a man, for a man's trivial joys or calamities, though he himself be that man.” Inevitably, one also thinks of Thomas Aquinas. In 1273, he fell into a prolonged trance while meditating alone after mass. Aquinas never spoke of the experience but immediately stopped all writing—thereby leaving his life’s work, the massive Summa Theologiae, unfinished. Enjoined to return to it by his amanuensis Reginald of Piperno, Aquinas replied: “I cannot. After what I have seen, everything I have written seems to me like straw.”
[1] Admittedly, this surmise overlooks the role of disciples in recording and promulgating the views of their teacher. It is well known that Pythagoras and Socrates did not write. Jesus only once wrote something in the dust with his finger (John 8:6) and no man saw what he had written.