4
O
viedo
| C
ampoamor
T
heatre
| 22
nd
O
ctober
2004
We are witnessing the astounding, liberating transformation of an era, of the world, of reality,
perhaps of man himself. We are perched on the rim of a volcano, and from all around there comes
the thunder of war, of a war that first ravages one part of the globe and then involves the world as a
whole, like a cancerous metastasis. As I am fromTrieste, I come from Italy, but also from a small part
of that Central European civilization, Mitteleuropa, that before its time intuited, lived, and staged an
upheaval comparable in history only with the demise of the world of antiquity. We live in a reality
like the one described and foreseen by Musil; a reality floating on air with no foundations, made up
of many copies of originals that have been lost or may never have existed, where events seem to be
Parallel Actions similar to others that nevertheless do not happen, where a person feels as if he were
multiple centrifuged beings, as if he were a scattering of islands rather than a single, compact whole.
We have entered the control room of life’s factory, where we do not know if our great-grandchildren
will be like us, how much they will be like us, whether they will share our passions or whether they
will be almost another species. Reality is a theatre set that is constantly taken down, and we move
across it like Don Quixote through La Mancha. We have created no
Don Quixote
, at most an
Amadis
of Gaul
, and our old costumes wardrobe collects dust and gets even older and worse in this universal
translocation that is taking place; yet this also plays its part in the shaping of a reality that is difficult
to imagine. In its present and future —which is already partly our present, but is also still partly
the future for us— Nietzsche and Dostoyevky foresaw the universal advent of nihilism. Much will
depend on whether, like Nietzche, we experience it as a liberation to be celebrated, or whether, like
Dostoyevky, as an illness to be cured of.
Claudio Magris
—
Prince of Asturias Award
for Literature
2004
Excerpt from the speech given on
the occasion of receiving the Prince
of Asturias Award for Literature
on 22/10/2004.
