Leafing through James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, I paused at a sentence I had underlined when I first read the book, where Boswell records Samuel Johnson as saying, “It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentional lying, that there is so much falsehood in the world”, and meditated for a moment on Dr Johnson’s epigrammatic style of expressing an idea that gives it the aura of timeless wisdom. There were several other passages in my old copy that I had underlined years ago, each an example of an idea expressed with an impeccable logic in a graceful and witty style.

Many of the books in my library have lines or entire paragraphs that I underlined with a pencil or a red ballpoint pen when I first read them; a passage thus marked usually expresses convincingly or elegantly an idea that makes it a memorable quotation. Sometimes, when the author’s idea elicits disbelief and is judged to be unsupportable by facts, that statement is underlined, sometimes in aggressively thick red lines, and a marginal remark added. Lines in novels and volumes of poetry are underlined when there is a particularly felicitous expression or if the lines are especially poor. The passages thus marked facilitate future reference when an idea I am working on needs to be supported by a precise quotation from a remembered text. And sometimes a haunting memory of a particularly fine passage compels me to pull out the book from the shelf and flip through the pages to read the marked lines for the sheer pleasure of reacquainting myself with the fine thought that had thrilled me decades ago.

On writing in a foreign language — English — and the penchant for using quotations

I have been looking at the lines marked as memorable quotations in many of my old books because I offered to donate 500 of them to the newly opened International Centre for Pakistani Writing in English, and in taking the books out of the shelves, have been glancing through them both as a critic judging them for their literary worth to future writers and also as a librarian whose only concern is to accumulate a comprehensive archive for curious readers and research scholars. While the function of the critic is to advance that discriminatory evaluation with which those writers are identified who are worthy of admission to the pantheon of world writers, the function of the librarian is to be all-inclusive, to express no critical judgment, but make every new work available within an established category.

The library as an archival repository for a nation’s literary wealth is of as much institutional worth as any treasure-laden collection — e.g., in the UK, the British Library has as much (much more, most likely) treasure in books and manuscripts as the Tower of London with its room full of crown jewels. France has its Bibliothèque Nationale, the U.S.A. the Library of Congress, both filled with their nation’s literary treasure.

And Pakistan?

Given the paucity of financial resources, it is still laudable that the Pakistan Academy of Letters has been attempting — struggling, perhaps — to advance the work of Pakistani writers in the several languages in which it is produced. More significantly, however, a new institution was launched two years ago dedicated to the conservation and promotion exclusively of Pakistani English-language writers. The brainchild of the poet Athar Tahir, the International Centre for Pakistani Writing in English (ICPWE) officially opened with an inaugural conference in February 2016 at Lahore’s Kinnaird College, which is to be the Centre’s permanent home.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must state that I am represented at the ICPWE and, after visiting it a year ago when it was in the early stages of being established, I enthusiastically support Athar Tahir’s conception of creating a permanent archival space for the work of English-language Pakistani writers. I must admit, however, that I felt a little reservation at the start, for, to be honest, I have no interest in being labelled and put into a compartment; no writer should — one is either a good writer or one is not, there should be nothing more to say. But that is for the unbiased future to decide, not the opinionated present, and after my initial hesitation to Athar Tahir’s proposal, I concluded that it was a question of solidarity for me to support the centre.

A priest cannot deliver a compelling sermon without quoting from a sacred text; a philosopher cannot offer an argument without making either a direct or an implied reference to philosophers from Aristotle to Zeno; and so with all scientists and artists whose distinction in their respective work is related to the established past work in their field that exists in their minds as an exhaustive dictionary of quotations. In writing, T.S. Eliot made the incorporation of lines from other poets a part of The Waste Land; in painting, Picasso did his own version of Velasquez’s ‘Las Meninas’; and modern composers have similarly ‘quoted’ from past music, as when composing his Dumbarton Oaks Concerto Stravinsky referenced Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos as a structural model. An original work of art reverberates with complex quotations from the tradition.

Born in Pakistan, English is not our native language but one that historical circumstances have led us to adopt. I, for one, Punjabi-born at the time of the Raj, did not speak a word of English till I was eight. In the early post-independence years, in the 1950s and ’60s when some of us from the former colonies who were producing work in the language of our former rulers and were among the first who were beginning to publish in London, we experienced a patronising indulgence from the British. Fifty years later, when the persuasions of multicultural diversity and political correctness favour our acceptance in London and New York, instead of being truly liberated, which we can only be if we remain free of oppressive trends and have the ambition to be among the very best writers in the English language, many of us have surrendered to the new colonialism of serving what the imperial publishers want, formula fiction with a contemporary twist to the familiar socio-political subject matter.

Therefore, the opening of the ICPWE is an opportunity to nourish the individual independence of future Pakistani writers. Let us always keep the door open to them, so that their imagination, stirred by the comparative achievement of their predecessors, may be inspired by a strong desire to emulate, or exceed, the best. The only loyalty a writer is obliged to acknowledge is to the language in which he or she is writing. It is an obligation owed to the literary tradition of that language and to the wider cultural context in which that tradition has evolved over the centuries. There is no other obligation, none, not to a group, not to society, not to one’s nation. And remember, too, that a writer’s, as well as the reader’s, primary obsession, a deeply personal and private obsession which is unrelated to any external loyalty, is to dive into his or her unique interior self, into that darkness of the soul in which one is certain one can just begin to see a gleam that promises to be brightly illuminating, and, with luck, to resurface clutching a few words that articulate a semblance of that gleam. Add to that the fact that ours is a split personality — we’re Pakistanis talking Urdu in the drawing-room, but going to the study to write we become English.

Furthermore, unlike the native-born English writer who is imbued with an instinctive knowledge of his literature’s cultural context, a Pakistani writer has to acquire that knowledge through wide reading and maintain a deliberate ongoing attempt not to deviate from a precise objectivity; this can work to a foreign writer’s advantage because, for example, whereas the native-born writer instinctively puts down a familiar commonly used phrase when describing an object, the foreigner, dissatisfied with common usage which with the native is often a cliché, instead attempts a closer, more precise descriptive image to show the object, and thus creates an imaginatively richer language full of fresh images, as may be seen in the work of the two singular foreigners who wrote in English, Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov.

And so — and this is what I meant by solidarity — I keep taking down books, among them Conrad’s letters and Nabokov’s novels, to send to the ICPWE, choosing those which I hope will instil in future Pakistani writers the ambition to be among the very best and not, like so many who already are, merely successful by following a formula, and glancing through the selected books, find so many quotations that I hope will awaken that ambition.

Quotations are an essential basis on which all knowledge is founded, sustaining new ideas with a reference to some canonical text. A priest cannot deliver a compelling sermon without quoting from a sacred text; a philosopher cannot offer an argument without making either a direct or an implied reference to philosophers from Aristotle to Zeno; and so with all scientists and artists whose distinction in their respective work is related to the established past work in their field that exists in their minds as an exhaustive dictionary of quotations. In writing, T.S. Eliot made the incorporation of lines from other poets a part of The Waste Land; in painting, Picasso did his own version of Velasquez’s ‘Las Meninas’; and modern composers have similarly ‘quoted’ from past music, as when composing his Dumbarton Oaks Concerto Stravinsky referenced Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos as a structural model. An original work of art reverberates with complex quotations from the tradition.

Indeed, the Tower of Babel can be said to be resounding with the continuous recitation of billions of quotations. Our minds are filled with the works of other imaginations from which we construct combinations for our peculiar conception of reality; and thus, if the texts echoing their quotations within your mind are a combination, say, of the Old Testament, the words spoken at the Sunday sermon, and the writings of C.S. Lewis and Miguel de Unamuno, then yours will be a Christian religious conception of reality; and it would be a very different reality should the echoes be of the words of Bertrand Russell and Samuel Beckett sounding like muffled thunder in a universe pictured by the Hubble telescope.

We are all impressed by quotations. A common conventional approach to writing an essay used to be to start with a quotation from Dr Johnson — still is with some people — which apparently assured the reader that the writer was a learned scholar, portly and balding, with half-moon spectacles slipping down his nose. If not Dr Johnson, then Oscar Wilde, or, if one really wanted to show off one’s superior intellect, with one from Henry James, a dependable source for quotations resonating with intimidating authority.

Quotations from the famous dead add authority to the expression of our ideas. The assertion of a personal belief that might appear eccentric is less in danger of being repudiated when it is preceded or followed by a quotation from an authoritative figure whose ideas are universally accepted. In any debate, our argument is rendered more persuasive by quotations from famous sources. And in journalism an important criterion that makes a story credible is that it contains quotations, which can be confirmed to be true, attributed to the journalist’s sources or statements taken from witnesses.

Quotations in newspaper stories can also lend an aura of incontestable truth to what may only be someone’s opinion, and therefore of questionable truth. Not long ago, there was a story in The Guardian about the discovery of some unknown poems by Pablo Neruda in which the reporter quoted Gabriel García Márquez as saying that Neruda was the greatest poet of the 20th century. Now most readers, even of The Guardian, know little, if any, of Neruda’s work, but to be quoted that pronouncement by the universally revered Márquez must make them assume that it must be true, and thus the myth about Neruda’s supreme greatness is taken for granted. Well, for those who happen to know something about 20th century Spanish poetry, there is the small matter of the extraordinary work of Federico García Lorca, Antonio Machado, and César Vallejo. Of course, no one denies Neruda is a fine poet, but the greatest? In any case, such attribution is meaningless; literature is not a league table in which the poets are ranked. My complaint here is not against Márquez, who might have made his pronouncement in some context which might render his assertion reasonable, but against the journalist for using a quotation as if it confirms an undisputed truth, a statement that leads ignorant readers to believe an untruth to be an inarguable fact.

For an essayist, quotations provide a solid support for the advancement of problematic ideas or sometimes suggest the terms of discussion in which to lay out one’s thought — as when, leafing through a previously read book one is struck by lines one had marked and is stimulated to explore an idea.

I pause there, having just pulled out Selected Letters of Charles Baudelaire (translated by Rosemary Lloyd) from the shelf and become absorbed in some passages marked when I first read the book: “But I’m determined always to do what I want — at least where literature is concerned.” (Jan 9, 1856). “You know I have never considered literature and the arts as pursuing a goal at odds with morality, and that beauty in their conception and their style is all I demand.” (July 9, 1857). “… my eternal thesis: the goal of moral teaching is goodness, that of learning is truth, but poetry and sometimes the novel have beauty as their unique goal. Any man who cannot devote his faculties to these corresponding goals is neither a philosopher nor an artist … ” (8 Jan 1859). “One day you’ll come to admire perfection alone and you’ll scorn all these outpourings of ignorance.” (Feb 18, 1860).

In an age in which one’s contemporaries place a premium on subject-matter as if their ideal text resembled an investigative journalist’s report, it is reassuring to hear an undisputed great poet expressing his central credo that he is beholden to no current trend but pursues his own obsession with transforming the substance of his experience into an aesthetically pleasing form. Even as I reread the lines marked in Baudelaire’s letters, quotations from other writers stating the same ideas come to my mind. I next pick out Wallace Stevens’s The Necessary Angel, and find marked there, “I might be expected to speak of the social, that is to say sociological or political, obligation of the poet. He has none.” And to those who think literature needs to address current socio-political problems, Stevens answers, “Nothing in the world is deader than yesterday’s political (or realistic) poetry.” Other modern and ancient poets have dismissed social-minded concerned relevance, their obsession has been with perfection of form to attain that elusive phantom, beauty, which obsessed Baudelaire, and is echoed by Stevens saying in a letter, “My object is to write [a]esthetically valid poetry”.

Well, let me not begin to sound like the writer who flaunts brilliantly minted quotations in his essay like a military officer who covers his chest with decorations and medals in a pompous display to show off what in his self-conceit he presumes is his high distinction. So, dropping the Baudelaire and Stevens books into a box to be shipped to the ICPWE, I see a bright vision in my mind, a young Pakistani opening one of these books years from now and, being so impressed by the lines marked in it, becomes filled with the ambition to be a great writer creating unsurpassed beauty in his chosen language.

Zulfikar Ghose is a poet, novelist and literary critic. His novels include the trilogy The Incredible Brazilian, and The Murder of Aziz Khan which launched Pakistani fiction in English when first published in London 50 years ago. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin.