Came back John Banville with some particular memories, some Dublin memories that he has titled “The alchemy of time” (Alfaguara). Some pages where, under the pretext of remembering his walks, he evokes the Irish city through the echo that poets, writers and artists have left in it. But in reality what we have here are some slow reflections on memories, regrets and the child we still carry inside. «I always look at the world as if I were a child. It still seems strange, strange, even curious, to be alive in this world. I think all artists are infantilized. They are childish. Baudelaire, said that “a genius is nothing other than childhood told with precision.” This is true even of very sophisticated artists, such as Velazquez. “Both he and we looked around in surprise.”
The Dublin he describes is the Dublin of the writers.
Irish and Dubliners love to talk about their writers, but they never read them. People talk like James Joyce, but it makes me want to tell these people what Joyce says about Dubliners. He considered Dublin, and Ireland, to be in a state of paralysis. In fact, he left and never returned. But the important thing is that Joyce invented Dublin. And if he had returned, the real Dublin would have interfered with his imaginary Dublin. It’s the same with Beckett, only he writes about upper-middle-class Protestant Dublin, while Joyce writes about the lower-middle class. Now they are both Dubliners of the imagination. I’m not from Dublin. The Dublin that I write about in this book is a place imagined by the writers and for me it has echoes of resonance because they lived there.
“Trump voters hate intellectuals, artists and educated people”
What is imagined is important.
We live in an imagined world that we turn into real. I have always been fascinated by falling in love. I explain. You are surrounded by thousands of people and, suddenly, you are sitting in front of someone and the rest ceases to exist. That person becomes a god, although we know that that person is the same as another human being, but during that loving time, that person is divine. We elevate it to a transcendent existence. Until two years later, disappointment sets in.
In these memoirs he talks about the monster he has had inside him since he was little.
In fact, the one who writes my books is that monster inside me. A few years ago, I fell on the street, I tripped. It was a summer day. Six people helped me up. I remember thinking: under different circumstances, these same guys would be putting me in a cattle truck. Everything is circumstantial, people think about evil, but there is no evil, only circumstances create that evil. Yes, it is the circumstances that unleash the monster, as happened in Nazi Germany or with the massacre in Rwanda. In those circumstances, people would do anything. In fact, we still have no answer as to how so many people were beaten to death in Rwanda. With blows. We are talking about hard work.
«I don’t believe memories exist. Every time we remember, we imagine the past.”
Is that monster returning to Europe?
Yes, we are unleashing the monster again in Europe, but I hope that in the end it is not like that, although it does not look good. Who is to blame? To intellectuals, for how we ignore the rest of the world. People say they are not interested in our books, our photos or our music. I was in the United States for two months. So that year, I knew Trump was going to win, because I’ve known that country since the early ’60s, and this was an angry America… angry about nothing. Fear and the power of boredom… They are both there and you should never ignore those forces. People are capable of doing anything to not get bored. Boredom is the antechamber of death. But there is also that they hate us, the intellectuals, the artists, they hate the educated middle class, with their dinners, with their glasses of wine, with their sophisticated life. They can’t stand us. No Trump voter would read my book. He’d say, “Another guy who knows everything.” I don’t despise these people. In fact, a friend of mine claims that we need to learn to dine with people who bless the table. This is a pretty profound notion. It seems simple. Being able to deal with people who despise us, because in the United States those who bless the table are lower middle class people without training and without education who vote for Trump. That’s why my friend says that, but it’s too late for that. They’re coming for us. When I spoke to a person who lived there and had voted for Trump, I asked him why he had given him his vote. His response was that he was going to reduce the universities, that whole structure, to his level…
Memories. They are present on these pages.
I don’t believe memories exist. Every time we remember, we imagine the past. But it is true that there are things we have done that cannot be undone. In one of my books I talk about a murder. The murderer says that he was not always a murderer, but once a murder is committed, one is a murderer forever. You can’t escape remorse. When I lived in Dublin and was almost twenty years old, my father came, because there was a circus in the city and he liked it. He asked me if I wanted to go with him. I told him no. I still have regrets about that answer. I still feel bad. I should have gone with my father. This was a crime. That is the monster of selfishness.
In these pages it says that the child is still within the person he is today.
The child is always within us. In moments of stress, anguish, suffering, one feels like a child, which is useful for an artist, because in childhood everything is new, all experiences are experienced for the first time. This is how an artist has to look at the world. When you look at the clouds, it has to be a new emotion. We have to renew everything…
“I should have written less and lived more.”
Old age is not what I thought. It’s curious. He thought it was disillusionment, dissolution, one’s collapse. He has the grace of him, a friend of mine, whom I call Cicerone in my book, urges me to go for a walk before our bodies fall apart. This is where I become the old philosopher and tell him: live life to the fullest, every moment of it, because only then will you not be afraid of death. It is those who do not live life intensely who fear death. My wife told me that she did not fear death because she had had a wonderful life and she had lived to the fullest.
In his book he talks about the tourists who step on the commemorative plaques with words from Joyce.
Tourism is destroying the world. The problem is cheap flights and telephones, because everyone thinks they have a lot of things to say and they have nothing to say. You see a couple in a restaurant and the first thing they do is talk on the phone. As I said in an interview: “Steve Jobs has destroyed my world.”
We are isolating ourselves.
We have disconnected from the world. I see people walking through the mountains without headphones… Do you understand? If you go to the mountains, listen to nature, but we cannot get rid of technology. It has come to stay. I am afraid that technology is not the real world, but it will be at the basis of the real world. AI is stupid. She’s dumb. The problem with machines is that they cannot have three thoughts at the same time. They are not like us, who are capable of being in a restaurant and talking, tasting a wine and noticing a woman. Although perhaps the machines consider that these disordered beings, these chaotic people, have to disappear…
