We are made of the same stardust of which all things are made, and when we are immersed in suffering or when we are experiencing intense joy we are being nothing other than what we can’t help but be: a part of our world.
In his youth Albert Einstein spent a year loafing aimlessly. You don't get anywhere by not 'wasting' time- something, unfortunately, that the parents of teenagers tend frequently to forget.
We are perhaps the only species on Earth to be conscious of the inevitability of our individual mortality. I fear that soon we shall also have to become the only species that will knowingly watch the coming of its own collective demise, or at least the demise of its civilization.
We are all born from the same celestial seed; all of us have the same father, from which the earth, the mother who feeds us, receives clear drops of rain, producing from them bright wheat and lush trees, and the human race, and the species of beasts, offering up the foods with which all bodies are nourished, to lead a sweet life and generate offspring.
When we talk about the big bang or the fabric of space, what we are doing is not a continuation of the free and fantastic stories that humans have told nightly around campfires for hundreds of thousands of years. It is the continuation of something else: of the gaze of those same men in the first light of day looking at tracks left by antelope in the dust of the savannah - scrutinising and deducting from the details of reality in order to pursue something that we can't see directly but can follow the traces of. In the awareness that we can always be wrong, and therefore ready at any moment to change direction if a new track appears; but knowing also that if we are good enough we will get it right and will find what we are seeking. That is the nature of science.
Our memory and our consciousness are built on these statistical phenomena. For a hypothetically supersensible being there would be no ‘flowing’ of time: the universe would be a single block of past, present and future. But due to the limitations of our consciousness we only perceive a blurred vision of the world, and live in time. Borrowing words from my Italian editor, ‘what’s non-apparent is much vaster than what’s apparent’. From this limited, blurred focus we get our perception of the passage of time. Is that clear? No, it isn’t. There is so much still to be understood.
Illusion or not, what explains the fact that for us time ‘runs’, ‘flows’, ‘passes’? The passage of time is obvious to us all: our thoughts and our speech exist in time; the very structure of our language requires time – a thing ‘is’ or ‘was’ or ‘will be’. It is possible to imagine a world without colours, without matter, even without space, but it’s difficult to imagine one without time. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger emphasized our ‘dwelling in time’. Is it possible that the flow of time which Heidegger treats as primal is absent from descriptions of the world?
I believe that our species will not last long. It does not seem to be made of the stuff that has allowed the turtle, for example, to continue to exist more or less unchanged for hundreds of millions of years; for hundreds of times longer, that is, than we have even been in existence. We belong to a short-lived genus of species. All of our cousins are already extinct. What’s more, we do damage. The brutal climate and environmental changes which we have triggered are unlikely to spare us. For the Earth they may turn out to be a small irrelevant blip, but I do not think that we will outlast them unscathed – especially since public and political opinion prefers to ignore the dangers which we are running, hiding our heads in the sand. We are perhaps the only species on Earth to be conscious of the inevitability of our individual mortality. I fear that soon we shall also have to become the only species that will knowingly watch the coming of its own collective demise, or at least the demise of its civilization.
As we know more or less well how to deal with our individual mortality, so we will deal with the collapse of our civilization. It is not so different. And it’s certainly not the first time that this will have happened. The Maya and Cretans, amongst many others, have already experienced this. We are born and die as the stars are born and die, both individually and collectively. This is our reality. Life is precious to us because it is ephemeral. And as Lucretius wrote: ‘our appetite for life is voracious, our thirst for life insatiable’ (De rerum natura, III, 1084). But immersed in this nature which made us and which directs us, we are not homeless beings suspended between two worlds, parts of but only partly belonging to nature, with a longing for something else. No: we are home.
Nowadays I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.
It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.
Other people’s words are so important. And then without warning they stop being important, along with all those words of yours that their words prompted you to write. Much of the excitement of a new novel lies in the repudiation of the one written before. Other people’s words are the bridge you use to cross from where you were to wherever you’re going.
Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member of the orchestra—they’ll take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, even. I am one of those. My writing desk is covered in open novels. I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigour when I’m too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when I’m syntactically uptight. I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka, as roughage. If your aesthetic has become so refined it is stopping you from placing a single black mark on white paper, stop worrying so much about what Nabokov would say; pick up Dostoyevsky, patron saint of substance over style.
Maybe every author needs to keep faith with Nabokov, and every reader with Barthes. For how can you write, believing in Barthes? Still, I’m glad I’m not the reader I was in college anymore, and I’ll tell you why: it made me feel lonely. Back then I wanted to tear down the icon of the author and abolish, too, the idea of a privileged reader—the text was to be a free, wild thing, open to everyone, belonging to no one, refusing an ultimate meaning. Which was a powerful feeling, but also rather isolating, because it jettisons the very idea of communication, of any possible genuine link between the person who writes and the person who reads. Nowadays I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own. To this end I find myself placing a cautious faith in the difficult partnership between reader and writer, that discrete struggle to reveal an individual’s experience of the world through the unstable medium of language. Not a refusal of meaning, then, but a quest for it.
Much of the excitement of a new novel lies in the repudiation of the one written before.
The middle of a novel is a state of mind. Strange things happen in it. Time collapses.
Here is the north, this is where it lies, where it belongs, full of itself, high up above everything else, surrounded by everything that isn't the north, that's off the page, somewhere else...
Pessimists can be such bores, and it's lazy to believe the worst.
All change begins with someone having a thought.
The study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.’ And in broad terms, psychogeography is, as the name suggests, the point at which psychology and geography collide, a means of exploring the behavioural impact of urban place.
My room is situated on the forty-fifth degree of latitude… it stretches from east to west; it forms a long rectangle, thirty-six paces in circumference if you hug the wall. My journey will, however, measure much more than this, as I will be crossing it frequently lengthwise, or else diagonally, without any rule or
method. I will even follow a zigzag path, and I will trace out every possible geometrical trajectory if need be.
- Xavier De Maistre, A Journey Around My Room
So, here was the notion.What about a tale of a man who “lost his way" who became so entangled in some maze of imagination and speculation that the common, material ways of the world became of no significance to him?
...
And it is utterly true that he who cannot find wonder,mystery, awe, the sense of a new world and an undiscovered realm in the places by the Gray’s Inn Road will never find those secrets elsewhere, not in the heart of Africa, not in the fabled hidden cities of Tibet. “The matter of our work is everywhere present,” wrote the old alchemists, and that is the truth. All the wonders lie within a stone’s-throw of
King’s Cross Station… I will listen to no objections or criticisms as to the Ars Magna of London, of which I claim to be the inventor, the professor and the whole school. Here I am artist and judge at once, and possess the whole matter of the art within myself. For, let it be quite clearly understood, the Great Art of London has nothing to do with any map or guide-book or antiquarian knowledge, admirable as these things are… But the Great Art is a matter of quite another sphere; and as to maps, for example, if known they must be forgotten… And all historical associations; they too must be laid aside… Of all this the
follower of the London Art must purge himself when he sets out on his adventures. For the essence of this art is that it must be an adventure into the unknown, and perhaps it may be found that this, at last, is the matter of all the arts.
- Arthur Machen, The London Adventure, or the Art of Wandering.
Perhaps life needs to be deciphered like a cryptogram. Secret staircases, frames from which the paintings
quickly slip aside and vanish (giving way to an archangel bearing a sword or to those who must forever advance), buttons which must be indirectly pressed to make an entire room move sideways or vertically, or immediately change its furnishings; we may imagine the mind’s greatest adventure as a journey of this sort to the paradise of pitfalls.
- Andre Breton, Nadja
Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance – nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city – as one loses oneself in a forest – that calls for quite a
different schooling.Then signboards and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet, like the startling call of a bittern in the distance,
like the sudden stillness of a clearing with a lily standing erect at its centre. Paris taught me this art of straying.
- Walter Benjamin, A Berlin Chronicle
The crowd was the veil behind which the familiar city as phantasmagoria beckoned to the flâneur. In it, the city was now landscape, now a room. And both of these went into the construction of the department store, which made use of flânerie itself in order to sell goods. The department store was the flâneur’s final coup.
- Walter Benjamin
We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. All cities are geological; you cannot take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends.We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors.
- Ivan Chtcheglov, Formulary for a New Urbanism
Also written in 1956, but first published in the Internationale Situationniste #2 in December 1958, Guy
Debord’s Theory of the Dérive outlines the second tool at the psychogeographer’s disposal. Described as ‘a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances,’ the dérive involves ‘playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects; which completely distinguishes it from the classical notions of the journey and the stroll.’27 Debord’s statement here is a highly contentious
one for it seems hard to think of the dérive in terms other than of those strolls undertaken by the surrealists a generation earlier. Yet, on closer inspection, although both appear to involve an element of chance and lack a preordained direction, the dérive does not demonstrate the pure submission to unconscious desire that characterised the surrealist wanderings and indeed the journeys of the
strolling flâneur.The dérive may lack a clear destination but it is not without purpose. On the contrary the dériveur is conducting a psychogeographical investigation and is expected to return home having noted the ways in which the areas traversed resonate with particular moods and ambiences. The results of this fieldwork form the basis for the situationist refashioning of the city.
- Guy Debord
Walking is the best way to explore and exploit the city; the changes, shifts, breaks in the cloud helmet, movement of light on water. Drifting purposefully is the recommended mode, tramping asphalted earth in alert reverie, allowing the fiction of an underlying pattern to reveal itself.
The concept of ‘strolling’, aimless urban wandering, the flâneur, had been superseded.We had moved into the age of the stalker; journeys made with intent – sharp-eyed and unsponsored. The stalker was our role-model: purposed hiking, not dawdling, nor browsing. No time for the savouring of reflections in shop windows, admiration for the Art Nouveau ironwork, attractive matchboxes rescued from the gutter. This was walking with a thesis. With a prey… The stalker is a stroller who sweats, a stroller who knows where he is going, but not why or how.
- Iain Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory.
An ever-increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets. airports and hotels. on motorways or in front of TVs, computers and cash machines. This invasion of the world by what Marc Auge calls 'non-space' results in a profound alteration of awareness: something we perceive, but only in a partial and incoherent manner. Auge uses the concept of 'supermodernity' to describe the logic of these late capitalist phenomena - a logic of excessive information and excessive space. In this fascinating and lucid essay he seeks to establish an intellectual armature for an anthropology of supermodernity. Starting with an attempt to disentangle anthropology from history. Auge goes on to map the distinction between place, encrusted with historical monuments and creative of social life. and non-place. to which individuals are connected in a uniform manner and where no organic social life is possible. Unlike Baudelairean modernity. where old and new are interwoven, Supermodernity is self-contained: from the motorway or aircraft. local or exotic particularities are presented two-dimensionally as a sort of theme-park spectacle.
On the way to his car Pierre Dupont stopped at the cash dispenser to draw some money. The device accepted his card and told him he could have 1800 francs. Pierre Dupont pressed the button beside this figure on the screen. The device asked him to wait a moment and then delivered the sum requested, reminding him as it did so to withdraw his card.'Thank you for your custom,' it added as Pierre Dupont arranged the banknotes in his wallet. It was a trouble-free drive, the trip to Paris on the All autoroute presenting no problems on a Sunday morning. There was no tailback at the junction where he joined it. He paid at the Dourdan tollbooth using his blue card, skirted Paris on the peripherique and took the A 1 to Roissy. He parked in row J of underground level 2, slid his parking ticket into his wallet and hurried to the Air France check-in desks. With some relief he deposited his suitcase (exactly 20 kilos) and handed his flight ticket to the hostess, asking if it would be possible to have a smoking seat next to the gangway. Silent and smiling, she assented with an inclination of her head, after first consulting her computer, then gave him back his ticket along with a boarding pass. 'Boarding from Satellite B at eighteen hundred; she told him. He went early through Passport Control to do a little duty-free shopping. He bought a bottle of cognac (something French for his Asian clients) and a box of cigars (for himself). Meticulously, he put the receipt away next to his blue card. He strolled past the window-displays of luxury goods, glancing briefly at their jewellery, clothing and scent bottles, then called at the bookshop where he leafed through a couple of magazines before choosing an undemanding book: travel, adventure, spy fiction. Then he resumed his unhurried progress. He was enjoying the feeling of freedom imparted by having got rid of his luggage and at the same time, more intimately, by the certainty that, now that he was 'sorted out', his identity registered, his boarding pass in his pocket, he had nothing to do but wait for the sequence of events.
'Roissy, just the two of us!': these days, surely, it was in these crowded places where thousands of individual itineraries converged for a moment, unaware of one another, that there survived something of the uncertain charm of the waste lands, the yards and building sites, the station platforms and waiting rooms where travellers break step, of all the chance meeting places where fugitive feelings occur of the possibility of continuing adventure, the feeling that all there is to do is to 'see what happens'.
The passengers boarded without problems. Those whose boarding passes bore the letter Z were requested to board last, and he observed with a certain amusement the muted, unnecessary josding of the XS and Y s around the door to the boarding gangway. Waiting for take-off, while newspapers were being distributed, he glanced through the company's in-flight magazine and ran his finger along the imagined route of the journey: Heraklion, Larnaca, Beirut, Dhahran, Dubai, Bombay, Bangkok ... more than nine thousand kilometres in the blink of an eye, and a few names which had cropped up in the news over the years. He cast his eye down the duty-free price list, noted that credit cards were accepted on intercontinental flights, and read with a certain smugness the advantages conferred by the 'business class' in which he was travelling thanks to the intelligent generosity of his firm ('At Charles de Gaulle 2 and New York, Club lounges are provided where you can rest, make telephone calls, use a photocopier or Minitel .... Apart from a personal welcome and constant attentive service, the new Espace 2000 seat has been designed for extra width and has separately adjustable backrest and headrest .. .').
He examined briefly the digitally labelled control panel of his Espace 2000 seat and then, drifting back into the advertisements in the magazine, admired the aerodynamic lines of a few late-model roadsters and gazed at the pictures of some large hotels belonging to an international chain, somewhat pompously described as 'the surroundings of civilization' (the Mammounia in Marrakesh, 'once a palace, now the quintessence of five-star luxury', the Brussels Metropole, 'where the
splendours of the nineteenth century remain very much alive'). Then he came across an advertisement for a car with the same name as his seat, the Renault Espace: 'One day, the need for space makes itself felt .... It comes to us without warning. And never goes away. The irresistible wish for a space of our own.
A mobile space which can take us anywhere. A space where everything is to hand and nothing is lacking ... .' Just like the aircraft really. 'Already, space is
inside you .... You've never been so firmly on the ground as you are in (the E)space,' the advertisement ended pleasingly. They were taking off. He flicked rapidly through the rest of the magazine, giving a few seconds to a piece on 'the hippopotamus - lord of the river' which began with an evocation of Africa as 'cradle of legends' and 'continent of magic and sorcery'; glancing at an article about Bologna ('You can be in love anywhere, but in Bologna you fall in love with the city'). A brightly coloured advertisement in English for a Japanese 'videomovie' held his attention for a moment ('Vivid colors, vibrant sound and non-stop action. Make them yours forever'). A Trenet song, heard that afternoon over the car radio on the autoroute, had been running through his head, and he mused that its line about the 'photo, the old photo of my youth' would soon become meaningless to future generations. The colours of the present preserved for ever: the camera as freezer.
An advertisement for the Visa card managed to reassure him (,Accepted in Dubai and wherever you travel .... Travel in full confidence with your Visa card'). He glanced distractedly through a few book reviews, pausing for a moment on the review of a work called Euromarketing which aroused his professional interest:
The homogenization of needs and consumption patterns is one of the overall trends characterizing the new international business environment . . . . Starting from an examination of the effects of the globalization phenomenon on European b:lsiness, on the validity and content of Euromarketing and on predictable developments in the international marketing environment, numerous issues are discussed. The review ended with an evocation of 'the conditions suitable for the: development of a mix that would be as standardized as possible' and 'the architecture of a European communication'. Somewhat dreamily, Pierre Dupont put down his magazine. The 'Fasten seat belt' notice had gone out. He adjusted his earphones, selected Channel 5 and allowed himself to be invaded by the adagio of Joseph Haydn's Concerto No.1 in E major. For a few hours (the time it would take to fly over the Mediterranean, the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal), he would be alone at last.
