Some time ago, during a speech I was giving at the Spanish Academy in Rome, a photographer kept dazzling me with a light to get a picture with her film camera so that I couldn’t read my notes. I reacted with irritation, saying, as I tend to do on such occasions with tactless photographers, that division of labor requires that when I’m working they must stop. So the person with the camera switched off her light, but behaved as if she’d been unfairly treated. Only last week, in the Apennine hill town of San Leo, at the start of a marvelous public event on the rediscovery of landscapes in the Montefeltro area that appear in the paintings of Piero della Francesca, three individuals were blinding me with their flashes, and once again I had to remind them about the rules of good behavior.
It should be noted that in both cases the dazzlers were not of the Big Brother kind, but presumably intelligent people who had come of their own free will to listen to discussions of a certain depth. Yet evidently the syndrome of the electronic eye had made them sink from the human level. With practically no interest in what was being said, all they wanted was to record the event, perhaps to put it on YouTube. They preferred not to follow what was being said so they could record on their cell phone what they could have seen with their own eyes.
This dominance of a mechanical eye to the detriment of the brain therefore seems to have affected the minds of otherwise civilized people. They’d have come out of whatever event they had attended with a few pictures—and they’d have been well justified had I been a striptease artist—but with no idea what they had heard. And if, as I imagine, they go around the world photographing everything they see, they are evidently condemned to forget the next day what they have recorded the day before.
I have described on previous occasions how in 1960, after a tour of French cathedrals, taking photographs like a madman, I gave up photography. When I got home I found myself with a series of mediocre photos and couldn’t remember what I had seen. I threw the camera away and recorded only mentally what I saw on my travels. For future reference, more for other people than for myself, I would buy a few good postcards.
Once, when I was eleven, my attention was caught by some odd noises on the highway just outside the city where I had been evacuated. Some distance away I saw that a truck had crashed into a horse-drawn cart driven by a farmer. His wife, who’d been sitting beside him, had been thrown to the ground, her head split open, and she was lying in a pool of blood and brain matter. I still recall the sight with horror, while her husband clung to her, howling in desperation.
I was terrified and didn’t get too close. Not only was it the first time I’d seen brain matter strewn across the asphalt, and fortunately it was also the last, but it was the first time I’d come face-to-face with Death. And Suffering, and Despair.
What would have happened if I’d had a cell phone with a camera in it, as every child has today? Perhaps I’d have recorded it to show my friends I was there, and then I’d have loaded my visual gem onto YouTube to give pleasure to other disciples of schadenfreude. And then, who knows, by continuing to record other tragedies I might have grown indifferent to the suffering of others.
Instead, I have stored all of it in my memory, and that picture, after seventy years, continues to obsess me and to teach me, yes, to make me a non-indifferent participant in the suffering of others. I don’t know whether children of today will still have these possibilities of becoming adults. Adults, with their eyes glued to their cell phones, are now lost forever.
2012