The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography by Ingmar Bergman

Author:Ingmar Bergman [Bergman, Ingmar]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Film & Video, Performing Arts, Entertainment & Performing Arts, General, Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780226043821
Google: bEEIAQAAMAAJ
Amazon: 0226043827
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 1988-02-13T22:00:00+00:00

23

Someone says I should write about my friends. That is unrealistic, unless one is very old and

one’s friends have already left this earth. Otherwise one ends up in an informal balancing act

between indiscretion and keeping secrets. Relax, you will be allowed to read what I write.

Someone wrote a detailed confession and his ex-mistress was naturally allowed to read the

manuscript. She went to the toilet and threw up, then demanded that her name should be

eliminated. The author agreed to her request, but at the same time took out all his positive

judgements and reinforced the negative ones.

Friendship, like love, is extremely clear-sighted. The essence of friendship includes openness, a

passion for the truth. It is a relief to see your friend’s face or hear his voice on the telephone, to talk

about just what is most painful and urgent, to hear the friend himself confess what he has hardly

dared to think. Friendship often has a touch of sensuality. The friend’s shape, his face, eyes, lips,

voice, movements and tone of voice are inscribed on your mind, a secret code which gives you the

Confidence to reveal yourself in true fellowship.

A love relationship explodes into conflicts; that is unavoidable. Friendship is tasted more

sparingly, without the same need for commotion and purgings. Occasionally sand sticks between

the vulnerable surfaces of contact, and then sorrow and difficulties arise. I think: I can manage

perfectly well without that idiot! Then a little time goes by and the unpleasant sensation of missing

him makes itself felt on various levels, sometimes obviously, often discreetly.

Now I am making contact, things mustn’t be like this. It is a matter of keeping track of our

capital. We weed out, clean and replace.

The result is uncertain: better, worse, or as before. We cannot know. Friendship never depends

on promises or protestation, nor on time and space. Friendship is absolutely undemanding, except

on one point. Friendship demands honesty, the only demand, but difficult.

A close friend emigrated after a life of extrovert activity. He settled on the Riviera, rented a

three-room apartment, sat on the balcony and made by rugs. His considerably younger woman

friend continued working back at home, but she went to visit the comfortable balcony for several

months a year. The friend fell silent; our conversations forging their way through a tough

undergrowth of reserve, and it took time and trouble to keep communications open. His messages

became more and more cryptic. Why the hell have you gone off to a balcony on the Mediterranean!

You’re dying slowly and politely without the corpse-spots showing! We conversed according to

ritual. I knew he had some worry on his mind which he was not confiding to me. Yes, thanks,

everything’s fine. It’s snowing on the palm trees but the magnolia is in flower.

I couldn’t tell him I knew about his anxiety. I didn’t want to hurt him by reproaching him for his

lack of candour.

For that matter, we are practically contemporaries — perhaps this is what the beginning of true

ageing is like. More and more, we lose our way in obscure halls and winding unswept corridors.

We talk to each other through faulty local telephones and stumble headlong over a reserve hard to

detect.

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