Readers - they are my only secret: gentle readers, avid readers, concerned readers willing to correct me whenever I stray from the straight and narrow, eager to remind me that honey catches more flies than vinegar (so does manure, but never mind about that now). Writers of the past were not as lucky as I am. During the Soviet era, for instance, the only advice our commissars had for our writers was a bullet in the neck....
The ghetto in Athens were I was born and raised has been torn down and paved over. The school in Venice where I was educated has been converted to a hotel. Even so, they continue to live in my memory and dreams. Canada, where I have spent most of my life, has so far failed to enter my dream world. From my days in Venice I remember Garo Basmajian, a pale sickly boy of fifteen from Marseilles who knew the PETIT LAROUSSE by heart and could identify a Rossini overture as surely as a Mozart symphony and a Beethoven sonata....
As long as I have only one reader and even if that reader insults and curses me, I will continue to write. It has happened more than once that after insulting me for years some readers have apologized. If one brainwashed dupe can be deprogrammed two may follow. To those who accuse me of entertaining messianic ambitions, I say: A messiah promises a kingdom in heaven. I promise nothing but the recovery of one’s powers of independent thought....
Democracy could also be defined as ceaseless resistance to fascism. Because fascism, in addition to being a constant temptation, is also easy. What’s hard is recognizing its signs and symptoms, such as: censorship in the name of some noble-sounding abstraction; ascribing one’s failures on foreign powers (xenophobia); exaggerating one’s tribal or national uniqueness or superiority by re-writing history.
BODY LANGUAGE Ideas too have a body language - the vocabulary they employ, the choice of clichés or their avoidance, their tempo and tonality… in short: to a skilled reader an idea can be as transparent as the confession of a guilty butler in an English mystery. MEAN WOMEN A mean woman can teach a man more about his vulnerabilities and limitations than a thousand yataghan-wielding Turks. If you survive such a specimen you can survive anything!...
When the old fight, it is the young who die. When the rich fight, it is the poor who die. If it were up to the old and the rich to do the dying, we would have no more wars. When we are young, we are driven. When old, we wonder what it was that drove us. It is not easy writing for readers who already know everything they need to know, even if what they really know happens to be recycled mumbo jumbo....