INTERVIEW:
Question 1
Do you think that one can learn through the media and that this can be integrated with
studying texts? Or are these two forms destined to be in conflict?
Answer
It is a difficult integration. Television works against the reading experience. The
reading experience is highly solitary, it is cognitive, it involves at every point an
immense difficulty which has to be overcome. It is something that brings you up
continually against the resistance of your own self, which you learn implicitly as well as
explicitly, which you have got to overcome if you are to read well. The experience of
viewing anything, whether it be a motion picture or a street scene, or a twilight or a
television screen, is the very antithesis, is the total denial of what it is that we are
doing when we read deeply. So there is a palpable irony in what I am saying, since I am at
the moment addressing you on a screen.
Question 2
But, addressing students, inviting them to read...
Answer
Inviting them to read but telling them that they will either read or they will die. That
is to say, they will experience a kind of death in life. This, in the end, is what Dante
and Shakespeare are about and what Dante and Shakespeare are fighting; the overwhelming
burden of every great Western writer, and I am sure Eastern writers also, though,
obviously, I do not know them as well. From the Yawist or J writer, through to a Montale
or a Wallace Stevens, it has to do with what the Yawist regarded as the blessing, that is
vitalising. You do not vitalise yourself if you do not read, because it is very difficult
to distinguish between the experience of reading and the experience of thinking. They are
essentially, I think, the same experience. Indeed, just as one cannot separate thinking
from remembering, just as memory is, I think, the most important element in the cognitive
process, so memory, is the most important element in the reading process. There is a kind
of extraordinary unity in the end, an identity, a virtual identity, between active memory,
reading and cognition. It is precisely that virtual density, that near unity, upon which I
think ultimately this virtual life of each individual is dependent. If you will not read,
and read deeply, and do it throughout a lifetime, then you are hurting yourself, you are
in effect destroying yourself.
Question 3
In the era of television, can Dante and Shakespeare remain shared reference points?
Answer
Nothing is going to dim the pre-eminent value of Dante or Shakespeare or Milton. Nothing
is going to take away from every new generation as it rises. Whether in America or Italy
or any other country, nothing will keep young readers -in spite of all the impediments, in
spite of the giant television screen staring down at them from every side, in spite of all
sorts of politics being flung upon them or all sorts of irrelevant social guilt - from
passionate involvement with the great texts. In the end, in the same way in which you have
to make a choice between friends and between acquaintances - none of us can have a close
relationship with everyone whom we encounter in the course of every day of our life - you
avoid madness and you continue to function by choosing, and it is both an implicit and
explicit process, as falling in love is a mostly implicit process, though with explicit
consequences. That, like the whole question of falling in love, is very closely related to
why it is in the end that one chooses to spend one's time reading Shakespeare and Dante
rather than lesser kinds of figures. You choose what most challenges you. "You
choose", as Coleridge beautifully said, "what finds you", and in the end it
is Dante and Shakespeare who will find you.
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