But the landscape of devastation is still a landscape. There is beauty in ruins.
It is intolerable to have one’s sufferings twinned with anybody else’s.
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. OSCAR WILDE, in a letter.
What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-remembered pictures from the Second World War, appear to have been staged. It is that we are surprised to learn they were staged and always disappointed.
Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead.
Citizens of modernity, consumers of violence as spectacle, adepts of proximity without risk, are schooled to be cynical about the possibility of sincerity. Some people will do anything to keep themselves from being moved.
To photograph people is to violate them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.
I am sick of having opinions. I am sick of talking.
Beware of anything that you hear yourself saying often.
If one could amputate part of one’s consciousness...
When the right person does the wrong thing, it’s the right thing.
None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew what it did. From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art.
But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else.
But the past is the biggest country of all, and there’s a reason one gives in to the desire to set stories in the past: almost everything good seems located in the past, perhaps that’s an illusion, but I feel nostalgic for every era before I was born; and one is freer of modern inhibitions, perhaps because one bears no responsibility for the past, sometimes I feel simply ashamed of the time in which I live.
To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck.
A writer is first of all a reader. It is from reading that I derive the standards by which I measure my own work and according to which I fall lamentably short.
With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind – like most historical evidence.
I am tired. I would like to be a mountain, a tree, a stone.
It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation – a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility, which regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime. Something to be fixed. Something to be refused. Something that makes one feel powerless.
What do I enjoy? Music, being in love, children, sleeping, meat.