If there is any way for a human being to loosen the grip of the system — the social, economic, psychological structures that quietly shape thought and desire — it may lie in a long, patient companionship with the great writers of history. Not merely reading them for information or entertainment, but approaching them as one would approach mountains, rivers, or sages: as presences that alter the scale of one’s inner world.
Such a journey begins at the dawn of poetic consciousness. Valmiki, singing the Ramayana, does not merely narrate events; he shapes an entire moral and emotional universe. Vyasa, through the Mahabharata, holds within a single epic the full turbulence of human dharma — duty, conflict, doubt, transcendence. Bhasa and Kalidasa refine experience into luminous form, where nature, longing, time, and destiny move with an almost cosmic grace. These writers do not appear as “authors” in the modern sense. They seem less like individuals seeking expression and more like instruments through which civilization speaks to itself.
To enter their world is to experience writing not as self-display but as participation in a vast continuity. The work does not shout, “Look at me,” but whispers, “This is how existence unfolds.”
As we move forward in time, we encounter another stream — Chaucer mapping the variety of human types, Shakespeare opening the inner chambers of ambition, jealousy, love, and mortality, Alexander Pope chiseling language into moral and satirical precision, Ibsen turning the stage into a battlefield of social truth. The modern writer stands more visibly as an individual consciousness. Personality sharpens. Psychological depth intensifies. Society itself becomes an object of examination and critique.
Yet something else also shifts.
In the ancient imagination, writing often seems aligned with something supra-personal — dharma, cosmic order, sacred tradition, collective memory. The poet is a seer, not a brand. The work is an offering, not a product. Immortality is not chased; it is a byproduct of depth.
In the modern world, the conditions of authorship change. Print, markets, publicity, and institutions create a literary economy. Name, fame, recognition, and money enter the field not as accidents but as structural realities. It would be unfair to claim that all modern writers are driven by these; many struggle fiercely against such pulls. But the gravitational field has shifted. Writing risks becoming performance, career, or identity construction.
The contrast, then, is not simply between “pure” ancient writers and “corrupt” modern ones. It is between two orientations of consciousness.
One writes as though the self were a channel — a place where language, myth, and truth pass through. The other writes as though the self were the center — expressing, asserting, distinguishing. Both produce great art. But they lead the writer inward along very different paths.
To study the great lineage — from Valmiki to Vyasa, from Kalidasa to Shakespeare, from epic poets to modern dramatists — is to gradually loosen the illusion that our own time, our own struggles, and our own ambitions are ultimate. We begin to see writing as a long civilizational conversation. Our ego becomes smaller; our responsibility becomes larger.
In that shrinking of ego and widening of vision lies a subtle freedom.
The “system” — of status, comparison, anxiety, and self-importance — feeds on the belief that we are isolated individuals fighting for visibility. But when a writer places themselves in the company of centuries, something changes. One writes less to be seen, and more because something must be said. Less to accumulate, more to serve meaning itself.
This may be the quiet way out: not rebellion, not withdrawal, but alignment with a deeper current of human expression. To write as part of a lineage rather than as a competitor in a marketplace. To let the work matter more than the name attached to it.
In such writing, fame may come or not. Money may come or not. But the act itself becomes an inner discipline — a movement toward clarity, depth, and participation in something larger than the restless modern self.
And perhaps that is the oldest purpose of literature: not to decorate life, but to help the human mind remember its true scale.
