[Long read, but well worth it. The conversation struck me, and transcribing it allowed what he says about humanity’s future to really sink in. Rewinding to listen again, uninterrupted.]
at 19:00 Interviewer: .. Consolation - literature being offering you what you have called consolation.. offering you solace and consolation. You speak of it in the Book of Job and also of the Punic Wars. You take these books on trips.
WH: When I know it’s going to be a difficult journey... I take the version earlier than the King James, the very beautiful stylized German and actually the birth of the High German language.
Interviewer: Before we get to the Punic War - Consolation, literature offering consolation...
WH: Yes, it does for me, and The Peregrine by J. A. Baker (1967), an English writer about whom we know nothing. Everyone who wants to be filmmaker, be an artist should read this - the intensity of observation and the passion in it that becomes completely almost incantatory and then moments of prose that you have to go back to Joseph Conrad. In reading this I know this is myself as well, a brother out there, I don’t know what the J. A. stands for, I don’t want to know, but he is like a deep friend to me who gives me consolation. Music sometimes has that and of course religion, but I’m not religious... I have problems with religion.
Interviewer: I know, I know... But, what does consolation mean?
WH: When you are exposed in this universe where we only partially really belong, we are strange guests here, that do not really fit and there’s some sort of permanent self-destruction going on where the archetypical, the arch sin, started in Neolithic times when we gave up a nomadic existence. There are only a few pockets [left] of nomadic existence.
And Bruce Chatwin, by the way, speaks about it very very very clearly. With him I had this Nexus that we do about traveling on foot also something reminiscent of nomadic existence but there is something self-destructing since then, cities, science, evolution into a highly technical society that has the seeds of self-destruction in it. We are too many and we consume too much and it doesn’t look good what’s going on. So at the same time we cannot be nostalgic again and say let’s all go back and be nomads again. We won’t. This is what it is and it is a very precarious existence and we are in a very precarious situation.
I hear it all the time - “technology will evolve and we will colonize the planets”. No, we won’t. Because the biggest planets are only gaseous and the Sun is unfriendly. It’s a hundred thousand atomic explosions going on there. We shouldn’t be on the Moon, we need air to breathe and it’s the breath of hundreds of millions and millions of human beings and trees and volcanoes that have shaped our atmosphere. It’s the entire history of breath that we don’t have out there. It is a hundred times more feasible to live at the bottom of the oceans, or Antartica or colonized Greenland with millions of people much easier than maintaining 25 people on Mars. It just will not work. It’s not gonna work, period.
And we will not reach our next star, outside our solar system because it is 4 1/2 light years away, which means that the fastest acceleration that a human body can take is 110 years until you reach it to accelerate and deccelerate. We just won’t do it. Period. And, there will be 500 generations of freaks, of mad people who have forgotten why they are on this trip and there will be palace revolts and there will be unspeakable urchins reaching Alpha Centari. Unspeakable. We don’t belong there. We belong here and it doesn’t look that good.
Interviewer: It doesn’t look that good belonging here. It’s a problem. [Said sadly as maybe he realizes that WH seeks consolation in literature, as solace away from humanity’s future]
WH: We can make the very best out of it. It’s wonderful to be alive and plant an apple tree or make a movie. Martin Luther was asked “what would you do if the world came to an end tomorrow?” He said I would plant an apple tree. It was a good answer. I would make a movie. Of course it would remain unfinished, but so what...
