As I become conscious of global warming and the disappearance of spring and fall, and find it confirmed in various authoritative writings, I wonder how my grandson, who is not yet two, will react one day when he hears mention of the word “spring” or reads poetry at school that describes the first languorous moments of autumn. How, in the future, will he react to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons? Perhaps he will live in another world to which he is fully accustomed, and won’t miss the spring, watching berries form on hot winter days. After all, as a child I had no experience of dinosaurs and yet I could imagine them. Perhaps springtime is just an old person’s nostalgia, like nights spent in air raid shelters playing hide-and-seek.
And will this child of the future think it normal to live in a world where the prime virtue is being seen, a value more important now than sex or money? A world where people will be ready to do anything to be seen on television—or whatever will have replaced television by then—so as to be recognized by others and not to vegetate in a frightening and unbearable anonymity. A world where more and more respectable mothers will be ready to recount the most sordid family tales in a sob-story broadcast, so that they can be recognized the next day in the local supermarket and sign autographs. A world where young girls will say they want to be an actress, as they do today, but not to become a Dietrich or a Garbo, not to perform Shakespeare or to sing like Josephine Baker, wearing nothing but bananas on the stage of the Folies Bergère, and not even to do a graceful high kick like the dancers of a bygone time, but to become a television quiz girl, purely for show, with nothing in the way of talent.
Someone in the future will then explain to this child at school, along with lessons about the kings of Rome and the fall of Berlusconi, or films titled Once Upon a Time There Was Fiat, how human beings have always, from earliest antiquity, sought to be recognized by those around them. And how some would try to be good company at the local bar in the evening, others to excel at soccer or clay-pigeon shooting at local festivities, or boast how they hooked a fish this long. And how girls wanted to be noticed for the pretty bonnet they wore to church on Sunday, and grandmothers for being the best cook or seamstress in the village. And heaven forbid that it shouldn’t have been so, for human beings, to become known, need to catch the eye of an Other, and the more they are recognized, or think they are recognized, the more they are loved and admired by the Other—and if instead of one Other there are a hundred or a thousand, then so much the better. They feel satisfied.
And so in an age of great and ceaseless movement, when people leave their villages and lose their sense of home, and the Other is someone with whom they communicate via the Internet, it will seem natural for human beings to seek recognition in other ways, and the village square is replaced by the global audience of the television broadcast, or whatever comes next.
But perhaps not even schoolteachers, or those who take their place, will recall that in that bygone time there was a rigid distinction between being famous and being talked about. Everyone wanted to become famous as the best archer or the finest dancer, but no one wanted to be talked about as the most cuckolded man in the village, for being impotent, or for being a whore. If anything, the whore would claim to be a dancer and the impotent man would make up stories about his gargantuan sexual exploits. In the world of the future, if it is anything like what is going on now, this distinction will be lost. People will do anything to be “seen” and “talked about.” There will be no difference between the fame of the great immunologist and that of the young man who killed his mother with a hatchet, between the great lover and the man who has won the world competition for the shortest penis, between the person who has established a leper colony in central Africa and the man who has most successfully avoided paying his tax. Every little bit will help, just to be seen and recognized the next day by the grocer or the banker.
I’d like to ask anyone who thinks I’m being apocalyptic why people now position themselves behind a person being interviewed so as to be seen waving ciao ciao to the television audience, or why they go on a quiz show not even knowing that one swallow doesn’t make a summer. What does it matter? They’ll be famous just the same.
But I’m not being apocalyptic. Perhaps the child I’m referring to will become the follower of some new sect whose purpose will be concealment from the world, exile in the desert, withdrawal into the cloister, the dignity of silence. After all, this has already happened, at the end of an age when emperors began to appoint their own horse as senator.
2002