I feel very much—I have felt increasingly in recent years—that the world has a kind of Vesuvius element now, that we’re waiting for something terrible to happen, and we do have an idea what it might be like, but maybe we’re pleasing ourselves with that because it might be much more terrifying. And I don’t want to say this to be doom-laden, but the world is not thinking—if it ever was—it’s not thinking of itself as something going on forever, our world, our so-called civilized world, the world we live in. I think that there is now a feeling of some terrible (how shall I say), culmination that’s happening, and we aren’t handling this is in any (I don’t mean we ourselves) way to absolutely reject that feeling; people who are sensitive to this aren’t grappling with it but sort of feeling that it’s almost become impossible to contest these things.
I hope I’m wrong about the doom part of this, but living in Naples, living in those ancient places, it does give you a feeling of a world that has gone on, with its errors and its triumphs and its art and its disasters, a world that’s gone on like this; that there was some price to pay, ultimately. And I’m sorry to talk like this, but I think that we haven’t dealt with this—I don’t mean me and I don’t mean you—but human beings have been living more in the immediate life and living in consumerism. And of course, scientists take much greater interest, but we aren’t prepared for what is the unknown for our coming world.
We have so much good that human beings have created in our world, our literature and art, these things that many people don’t participate in, but they would not have the life they have unless such things did exist in the world. And now there is, I feel, a kind of suspension: So what comes next? We know that this is leading to a world, which I hope may be better, but in which we don’t understand what’s happening.