It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question. A man with a soul is not like every other man. Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together. I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a ‘will to renewal’. This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of ‘crises’, of rupture, repudiation and resistance. When there is no crisis, there is stagnation, petrifaction and death. All thought, all art is aggressive. The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water. The unpleasant thing about society today is nowadays is that there is a confusion between people and their function; or rather, people are tempted to indentify with the function they perform. This is what's happening, particularly in totalitarian societies. I have often thought what is really upsetting, dehumanizing, is the fact that an official sleeps with his uniform on. I've always been suspicious of collective truths. Living is abnormal. You can only predict things after they have happened. We have not the time to take our time. |