P
rince
of
A
sturias
A
wards
1981-2014. S
peeches
5
It is a very great honour, and a very great pleasure, to be here today, at the heart of the Principality
of Asturias to receive this splendid award, for wich I offer heartfelt thanks.
Humankind’s most momentous invention is the sentence. There have been great civilizations
that did not have the concept of the wheel, but they had to have had the sentence, for without it
they would have been neither great nor civilized. It is with the sentence that we think, speculate,
calculate, imagine. It is with the sentence that we declare love, declare war, declare oaths—it is with
the sentence that we declare the self. Our laws are written in sentences. One might go so far as to
say that it is in sentences that our very world itself is written.
Others will make other claims. The scientist will say that the invention of mathematics is our
supreme achievement as a species. And it is true, the language of mathematics is a thing of sublime
beauty. Its great strength is its rigour. However, the great strength of the sentence, and by extension
language, is that rigour is precisely, gloriously, what it lacks. No matter how clear, direct and simple
a sentence is, it will always at some level be ambiguous. And the essence of life is ambiguity.
The language of sentences wraps itself around reality, in an endless effort to encompass it,
to comprehend it, to express it. The effort is in vain, as it must be. Ultimate reality is ultimately
beyond us. There is no such thing as the thing-in-itself: there are only the relations between things.
All is contingency. As Emerson beautifully says, “We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to
skate well on them.” Language, we may think, cuts no ice, but it does cut wonderful figures.
John Banville
—
Prince of Asturias Award
for Literature
2014
Excerpt from the speech given on
the occasion of receiving the Prince
of Asturias Award for Literature
on 24/10/2014.
