Presentació
The Time Machine (George Pal, 1960)
Memento mori
I've spent my life surrounded by books. I love how they feel, even their characteristic smell of old paper. I live with a large personal library. I devote a disproportionate amount of my parlous income to their search and adquisition, and have a wife who shares my taste, although perhaps without its accumulative intensity. I have no objection to digital books, which, in my experience, seem to match well with speed-reading, a fashion of the late 1950s, which I was taught to be able to do as a boy.
As a teacher, I can see how the taste for books, even for reading disappears day by day. It is a powerful reminder of the briefness of all endeavor, indeed of life. I am a writer. All historians are writers, even though usually not very good ones; academic authors are valued for their sources, not their prose, nor even their ideas. Since I write, probably in a by-now old-fashioned way, I can see – should I say it?- the writing on the wall. What I write, what I do, serves scant purpose.
It is said that certain medieval monastic orders of the stricter sort encouraged their monks to keep on a shelf the skull of a previous occupant of their cell. This was called a Memento mori, a remembrance of one's own limited nature, of the finiteness of life, or the futility of human enterprise. When I was twelve, in 1960, I saw George Pal's splendid film version of H.G. Wells' novel The Time Machine, with a fine performance by the Australian actor Rod Taylor. The sequence represented here instantly burnt itself into my imagination. Anything that I would do in my entire existence -I did not yet know I would spend it writing- would turn to dust.
I've spent my life surrounded by books. I love how they feel, even their characteristic smell of old paper. I live with a large personal library. I devote a disproportionate amount of my parlous income to their search and adquisition, and have a wife who shares my taste, although perhaps without its accumulative intensity. I have no objection to digital books, which, in my experience, seem to match well with speed-reading, a fashion of the late 1950s, which I was taught to be able to do as a boy.
As a teacher, I can see how the taste for books, even for reading disappears day by day. It is a powerful reminder of the briefness of all endeavor, indeed of life. I am a writer. All historians are writers, even though usually not very good ones; academic authors are valued for their sources, not their prose, nor even their ideas. Since I write, probably in a by-now old-fashioned way, I can see – should I say it?- the writing on the wall. What I write, what I do, serves scant purpose.
It is said that certain medieval monastic orders of the stricter sort encouraged their monks to keep on a shelf the skull of a previous occupant of their cell. This was called a Memento mori, a remembrance of one's own limited nature, of the finiteness of life, or the futility of human enterprise. When I was twelve, in 1960, I saw George Pal's splendid film version of H.G. Wells' novel The Time Machine, with a fine performance by the Australian actor Rod Taylor. The sequence represented here instantly burnt itself into my imagination. Anything that I would do in my entire existence -I did not yet know I would spend it writing- would turn to dust.
Aquesta web ha estat creada per Òscar González Camaño - des de 2012.
